Turn off USB harddrive after 10 minutes, or does it?

[micky]

When I'm in Power Option Properties of the Control Panel, and I set
the hard drives to turn off after N minutes, does that include USB
external harddrives?

I don't have such a drive connected now, or I woud just test it.

If the computer is marked Energy Star, would that make any difference?

Thanks.


()BTW, Adobe Flash Player 11.3 is fixed, with the help I got here,
especially Glee's. . I posted in that thread, whhich ran on the 4th
and 5th of August. )

 

[BillW50]

When I'm in Power Option Properties of the Control Panel, and I set
the hard drives to turn off after N minutes, does that include USB
external harddrives?

I don't have such a drive connected now, or I woud just test it.

If the computer is marked Energy Star, would that make any difference?

Thanks.


()BTW, Adobe Flash Player 11.3 is fixed, with the help I got here,
especially Glee's. . I posted in that thread, whhich ran on the 4th
and 5th of August. )

I don't think it works for USB drives. I do have two Samsung Story 3.5
external USB drives I use for backups. And something they do that I
can't change is that they spin down the drives after 5 minutes of the
last access. They call it a feature of being green. But I think of it
has an disadvantage.

I don't like spinning down hard drives unnecessary. As let's say it
starts and stops 6 times an hour and you use them 8 hours a day. That is
48 times a day, times 7, 52 weeks. That equals to 17,472 times per year.
And the MTBF on most drives are only 50,000 times. So the drive will
likely fail to spin up around 2 1/2 years of use. I don't know about
you, but I want far longer than 2 1/2 years out of my hard drives.

 

[Rich]

I don't think it works for USB drives. I do have two Samsung Story 3.5
external USB drives I use for backups. And something they do that I can't
change is that they spin down the drives after 5 minutes of the last
access. They call it a feature of being green. But I think of it has an
disadvantage.

I don't like spinning down hard drives unnecessary. As let's say it starts
and stops 6 times an hour and you use them 8 hours a day. That is 48 times
a day, times 7, 52 weeks. That equals to 17,472 times per year. And the
MTBF on most drives are only 50,000 times. So the drive will likely fail
to spin up around 2 1/2 years of use. I don't know about you, but I want
far longer than 2 1/2 years out of my hard drives.

I'm not an IT professional but it is my understanding that MTBF is expressed
as period of time before a piece of technology fails (hours I believe).
Somehow you have specifically morphed the definition into spin-up &
spin-down "time(S)". While it is generally accepted that spinning up a hard
drive may exert additional stress than normal running, the spin-down time
between spin-ups essentially subtracts from the MTBF and theoretically
extends the life of the hard drive. According to your logic, if I spin-down
a hard-drive for some reason one time per year and restart it, and it has a
MTBF of 50,000, I can expect 25,000 years of service.
Take a look here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_time_between_failures to
help your understanding of MTBF.

 

[BillW50]

In Rich typed:

I'm not an IT professional but it is my understanding that MTBF is
expressed as period of time before a piece of technology fails (hours
I believe). Somehow you have specifically morphed the definition into
spin-up & spin-down "time(S)". While it is generally accepted that
spinning up a hard drive may exert additional stress than normal
running, the spin-down time between spin-ups essentially subtracts
from the MTBF and theoretically extends the life of the hard drive.
According to your logic, if I spin-down a hard-drive for some reason
one time per year and restart it, and it has a MTBF of 50,000, I can
expect 25,000 years of service. Take a look here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_time_between_failures to help your
understanding of MTBF.

Yes that is the stress on the startup circuits. It doesn't count how
many hours the motors can run for. Or how many reads and writes the
heads can take. Nor how many movements the arm can make, or lots of
other factors.