Can I turn off a HDD?

[hockayak]

Okay, so i have a near silent PC that sits on my desk. I have a couple of M.2 and SATA SSDs for Windows, games, programs so i'm going pretty quietly generally. My media, which i really only use via Plex in another room, is on a standard HDD. Its not WAY noisy, as in broken, but it has a hum to it that is annoying me. Really i only need that HDD on for media, when watching, so i was wondering if i can opt to turn it off. Like maybe a click on a programmed Macro key or something and it just stop, and then when i get up to go and watch my stuff, i could just click that key again and click it on. 

 

That would be my ideal i guess. For now, I've tried the built in power plans that i have seen, but they only kick in when the whole system is idle, not just that disk. Really, nothing is being read/written to the disk most of the time, so i'd be happy if it just went to sleep after a minute or two and then woke up (even if it had a little delay) when it was needed. 

 

Anyone ever had any experience with this kind of idea?

[Master Disaster]

Nah, Windows Disk Sleeping options shouldn't care what the rest of the system is doing, as long as the disk isn't accessed for X amount of time it should be slept.

 

What type of disk is it? Some disks have overrides in the firmware to stop them from being slept.

 

Also its possible something is accessing the disk without you knowing and preventing it from going to sleep. You can watch Disk Activity to Device Manager to check if its being accessed or not.

[Lapsio]

depends on drive. Some drives allow to control spin-up/down idle times, allow to disable sleep at all (healthy option for desktop PC, quite dangerous for laptop) or put it to sleep manually (though I don't see any use for that) via SMART and ATA interface (on Linux there's smartctl and hdparm utilities that allows you to control that, windows should have similar tools).

 

HDDs wear out when you spin them up/down. Each HDD is rated for certain number of spin-up/spin-down cycles and certain number of load cycles. Manually invoking those operations may result in premature failure of drive.

 

If you want on/off feature it's better to get USB drive. They sometimes have on/off button on the back (eg. WD Elements). Or you can just buy enclosure if you don't want to buy another drive.

[hockayak]

On 6/23/2020 at 5:36 AM, Lapsio said:

If you want on/off feature it's better to get USB drive. They sometimes have on/off button on the back (eg. WD Elements). Or you can just buy enclosure if you don't want to buy another drive.

Yeah this i what i ended up deciding on. I pulled the drive, put in an external dock i have and sat that out of the way, the noise is then less when its on, and i can turn it off if its really humming away. 

 

Interestingly enough, Seagate offered me a pretty hassle free RMA on the drive so i might well do that too, as its way noisier than my other platter HDDs, but of course getting data off it and backed up before RMA is a pain in the butt, when the new drive might be exactly as noisy by design.