Power Save Settings for hard drive performance?

[Belmonte]

Hi everyone,

Here's a simple one: The power save settings in windows allow to turn off the hard disks after an amount of time. The feature is on by default and recommended, but I bet many of you have had problems with it. Often my system will stall while turning the drives back on, which can be frustrating when I'm in the middle of something.

What I'd like to know is if it's bad for my hard drives to turn off this power save setting. I know it probably isn't, but I'm not sure. Or maybe there's a script I could use to manually turn on my drives?

Any comments?

 

[SCSIRAID]

If your system is properly cooled then I wouldnt have any concern in letting the drives spin constantly (i.e power savings off). I personally would rather have them spinning and thus at constant temperature rather than power cycling and thermal cycling them. This question always brings on lots of discussion of which is better.....