Shut down hard drive

[oakj423]

I am running 5 hard drives in a PC running XP Pro. 1 of the drives
only gets used once a week and the other once a month for backups. It
seems silly and like a lot of wear & tear on the disks to keep them
running 24/7 like the other disks. Is it possible to shut down certain
disks after x hours of inactivity. *Not through power management where
I can have everything standby, etc, I want to just shut down 2 of 5
disks until they are needed again.

Suggestions?

 

[GlowingBlueMist]

I am running 5 hard drives in a PC running XP Pro. 1 of the drives
only gets used once a week and the other once a month for backups. It
seems silly and like a lot of wear & tear on the disks to keep them
running 24/7 like the other disks. Is it possible to shut down
certain disks after x hours of inactivity. *Not through power
management where I can have everything standby, etc, I want to just
shut down 2 of 5 disks until they are needed again.

Suggestions?

What I did was purchase external USB drive enclosures with power switches.
One I use TrueCrypt on and transport it to another location as an offsite
backup.

The others I keep hooked up through a USB hub and power on the device I want
to update and later hit the power switch on it when I'm done.

There are Hot Swap drive bays with associated caddy's or trays available but
they are not free either.

 

[oakj423]

I thought about that, but I'd like to keep all of the drives in the
CPU. That may work for some people, but personally I don't want to
mess with enclosures and everything. Good suggestion though.

 

[CBFalconer]

I thought about that, but I'd like to keep all of the drives in
the CPU. That may work for some people, but personally I don't
want to mess with enclosures and everything. Good suggestion
though.

What's wrong with using the power management? That shuts off the
drives individually, so that they only spin up when actually
accessed. The result is normally a one or two second delay to
access the drive, but everything is automatic.

I routinely set all my drives to spin down after 15 minutes of
non-use. The monitor after 10 minutes. This cuts the power
consumption way down.

Please do not top-post. It makes the entire sequence very
confusing. I fixed this one.

 

[visions of effty]

I am running 5 hard drives in a PC running XP Pro. 1 of the drives
only gets used once a week and the other once a month for backups. It
seems silly and like a lot of wear & tear on the disks to keep them
running 24/7 like the other disks. Is it possible to shut down certain
disks after x hours of inactivity. *Not through power management where
I can have everything standby, etc, I want to just shut down 2 of 5
disks until they are needed again.

Suggestions?

I thought that was the purpose of Control Panel>Power Options.

I could be wrong.

~e.

 

[John McGaw]

I thought that was the purpose of Control Panel>Power Options.

I could be wrong.

~e.

IIRC XP's power options are extremely simple minded -- either all the
drives are sleeping or none of them are and this is not what the OP was
asking for.

 

[xModem]

What I did was purchase external USB drive enclosures with power switches.
One I use TrueCrypt on and transport it to another location as an offsite
backup.

Do you just switch them off, or do you kill the USB connection first with
"Safely Remove Hardware" applet?

 

[visions of effty]

IIRC XP's power options are extremely simple minded -- either all the
drives are sleeping or none of them are and this is not what the OP was
asking for.

Right. I guess I'm assuming that once the drives are powered down they stay
that way until they are needed. Like, they all power down, then you move
the mouse or whatever and your main drive hops back to life while the others
stay snoozing. Probably not.

I guess I'm asking. I'm as curious as the OP. It seems like a simple
query. There should be a simple answer. I looked around and couldn't find
much agreement on the subject.

~e.

 

[CBFalconer]

.... snip ...

IIRC XP's power options are extremely simple minded -- either all
the drives are sleeping or none of them are and this is not what
the OP was asking for.

Don't know about XP, because I won't let it and its EULA anywhere
near anything of mine, but W98 FE definitely shuts down the
unaccessed drives only.

 

[John McGaw]

IIRC XP's power options are extremely simple minded -- either all the
drives are sleeping or none of them are and this is not what the OP was
asking for.

Right. I guess I'm assuming that once the drives are powered down they stay
that way until they are needed. Like, they all power down, then you move
the mouse or whatever and your main drive hops back to life while the others
stay snoozing. Probably not.

I guess I'm asking. I'm as curious as the OP. It seems like a simple
query. There should be a simple answer. I looked around and couldn't find
much agreement on the subject.

~e.


So far as I know they go to sleep together and they wake up together. I
never use that option since all of my systems are running distributed
processing applications and read/write at least once per minute. Out of
all the systems that have been doing this for years I've only ever had a
failure on a laptop. Of course I try not to think about how much I'm
paying on my electric bill to make all this magic possible...

 

[oakj423]

Don't know about XP, because I won't let it and its EULA anywhere
near anything of mine, but W98 FE definitely shuts down the
unaccessed drives only.

I think power management only powers down all of the drives. The other
thing I thought about is that all of this could be a total waste. For
example, I want the one drive to essentially "sleep" for 30 days. But,
when I open My Computer, is it going to "wake up" (like a CD drive) by
just having it display in My Computer? If that's the case, then it's a
wash. Thanks for all of the thoughts thus far.

 

[Alex Harrington]

I think power management only powers down all of the drives. The other
thing I thought about is that all of this could be a total waste. For
example, I want the one drive to essentially "sleep" for 30 days. But,
when I open My Computer, is it going to "wake up" (like a CD drive) by
just having it display in My Computer? If that's the case, then it's a
wash. Thanks for all of the thoughts thus far.

I think XP should cache the drive status - it may however wake the drive
from time to time if it has deemed the cache out of date...

Alex

 

[CBFalconer]

I think power management only powers down all of the drives. The other
thing I thought about is that all of this could be a total waste. For
example, I want the one drive to essentially "sleep" for 30 days. But,
when I open My Computer, is it going to "wake up" (like a CD drive) by
just having it display in My Computer? If that's the case, then it's a
wash. Thanks for all of the thoughts thus far.

Well, I never use "My Computer". If I want to know something about
files, I use dir in a command line window build around 4dos. So I
don't needlessly wake any sleeping drives. Yet the delays when I
do access a previously sleeping drive proves that the drives are
awakened individually.

Just on more example of the iniquities of a GUI interface.

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