Manually Time Out HDD?

[Ginger Penguin]

Hi all,

 

By far, the biggest source of noise in my system are 3 HDDs running in a RAID array I have to store media files for video projects I work on. When I'm not actually doing that kind of work, I really would like it if they just spun down. I have a timer set in Windows to time them out after a few minutes but they will just randomly spin up again for no apparent reason and stay on until they time out. Is there any way to get them to only spin up when I ask it to? Ideally, I would love for them to never be on and then when I'm ready to do some work, I click a button and they stay on until I'm done. Not sure how feasible this is but I still thought I should ask.

 

Cheers!

[manikyath]

8 minutes ago, W.D. Stevens said:

but they will just randomly spin up again

thats windows 10 being windows 10.

 

i'd sugest making sure the drive isnt indexed, and windows defender isnt trying to scan it. they're most likely spinning up because windows is doing background tasks on the disk.

[Archer42]

Well, something is accessing the drives if they spin up. Might be OS, might be something else, it will be a pain to figure out.

And there are no real ways in windows to do this manually, it is always going to be a pain. For example each time you open save/open dialog or just a list of disks in explorer they'll spin up. For this reason i personally always disabled spin down when i still had hdd-s, it is more annoying than useful.

 

The best solution, IMO, would be moving HDD-s into some kind of external box, either direct attached (usb) or nas. In case of usb box you will be able to turn the power on or off as needed, in case of nas - place it far enough for noise to be irrelevant.