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What do hard disks do when not been used ?

R

russell2002

Senior member
What do hard disks do when not been used ?

When a hard disk is powered up, but not been accessed what does it do.

Previosuly I had though they did nothing.

Yet reading recent posts after discovering a new drive I have still makes noize but is not faulty, its doing something.

Anyone any ideas ?
 
Depending on a bunch of things (OS, hardware settings, etc), the hard drive platter could be spinning but not reading/writting or it could be stationary ie not spinning. If the hard drive platter is spinning, obviously its going to have faster access times than if its stationary. The down side is that spinning takes alot of power and produces heat, but it can certainly make noise (even when not reading) and speeds things up a great deal.
 
aw i thought this thread was gona be about what to do with old hard drives, like use them for shooting practice or bricks to build a house.
 
some drives recalibrate the heads every x minutes to offset thermal expansion and contraction. at least on faster scsi drives.
 
Originally posted by: byosys
Depending on a bunch of things (OS, hardware settings, etc), the hard drive platter could be spinning but not reading/writting or it could be stationary ie not spinning. If the hard drive platter is spinning, obviously its going to have faster access times than if its stationary. The down side is that spinning takes alot of power and produces heat, but it can certainly make noise (even when not reading) and speeds things up a great deal.
Click to expand...

The only time your average user will see an idle hard drive spin down is if they're on a laptop which is incorporating that as a power saving feature.
 
like use them for shooting practice or bricks to build a house.
Click to expand...

Done that. I found that hollow points (hunting rounds) in my AK47 and SKS are a lot more fun than full metal jackets when it comes to 'retiring' HD's. 9mm's are fun with HD's as well.

M-16 round just goes through while barely damaging the drive.
 
It depends on the drive.

Periodically, some drives will have to recalibrate (due to temperature changes and expansion of moving parts).

You used to be able to get 'AV' drives because of this - because the recalibration would cause the drive to stop streaming, it could mess up video captures - so AV drives had the option to delay calibration until the drive was idle. Nowadays, I think most drives will wait until idle to recalibrate.

Modern, SMART enabled, drives will often use the idle time to perform self-testing. Essentially, the drive will run an internal type of 'scandisk' which will look for bad or weakening sectors and attempt to repair them. They may also test various parts of the mechanism (which may cause strange buzzing sounds). The idea being that the drive will automatically run tests to catch problems before they cause data loss, even if the OS isn't configured to run its own tests.

 
You can set them to power down after x minutes of idling, if you want to. Its in control panel > power mgmt. I find this useful to reduce noise. Also heat, power, longevity of drive, etc.
 
Originally posted by: spikespiegal
like use them for shooting practice or bricks to build a house.
Click to expand...

Done that. I found that hollow points (hunting rounds) in my AK47 and SKS are a lot more fun than full metal jackets when it comes to 'retiring' HD's. 9mm's are fun with HD's as well.

M-16 round just goes through while barely damaging the drive.
Click to expand...

Other than putting a hole in the drive lol
 
It really depends on the manufacturer and the controlling firmware. Some park at the resting position outside the platter like the Western Digital drives when not doing anything. Some park at the most inner platter alignment circular tracks like the Maxtor drives. In this case they are actually checking for head alignment and recalibrates every once a while. Some are actually smart enough to start checking the suspected bad spots and re-align the data to some reserve areas to prevent damages.
 

a long time ago i was a member of the Homebrew Computer Club.

there was this one guy that always stood up. he had a small business named "Crashed Platter Products". he would take the disks out of big old drives and make clocks from them. they looked cool because they were all mirrored.
 
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