Possible to power-down individual hard drives?

[Fresh Daemon]

The options in Windows are to either have all hard drives power-down after X minutes, or to stay on permanently.

My scenario is that I have a bunch of hard drives, some of which I need often and need constantly spun-up, and others which are rarely used and which I will often never access between boot and shutdown. Is there any way to set things so that these drives will power down, but the frequently-used ones will remain running?

Any freeware that will do the same job?

I have Googled it well and found nothing. Seems like it wouldn't be that hard, theoretically.

Thanks!

 

[Billb2]

That's impossible.

 

[corkyg]

For software control, agree with Billb2. However, mechanically it can be done.

It is possible if you have a mechnical means of turning power on and off for each drive and they are SATA. One way of doing this is to have them all in mobile racks with key switches.. If you are good with tools, etc., you could make a power switch panel that could be outside the case - all power leads to drives would go through that panel.

I have this kind of arrangement for two drives.

Swap

 

[Nothinman]

Any freeware that will do the same job?

For Windows, I don't think so. In other OSes you can just set the idle time on each drive, make sure nothing accesses them periodically and let the drive's firmware do it's thing.

 

[Fresh Daemon]

That's a shame. It seems like it would be so easy to implement too. I think I'm going to go with a dock and drives-in-a-drawer rather than cramming them all into the case anyway.

 

[KeypoX]

i thought windows already did this...

 

[Dari]

You would think servers would be able to do this in order to conserve energy.

 

[Nothinman]

You would think servers would be able to do this in order to conserve energy.

Only very recently has the whole "go green" thing become popular. Server power management is kind of an oxymoron.

 

[corkyg]

Anyione remember Romtec's+ TRIOS series? The last was Trios II.

Trios

And this was with IDE! SATA would be easy to create a power panel with switches. All of the SATA data cables would remain connected, and the power cables would simply rout through the switch panel. They could be simple on/off toggles or push buttons with LEDs. I would see up to 5 on a standard 5.25-in front panel.

Looks like a possible useful product.

 

[F1shF4t]

You can manually make HDDs spin down by using HDDScan. But it would be a pain to do it one by one.