Turning off my Harddrive

[GeorgeKellow]

I use an SSD for my os and other applications and I use my HD just for movies and pictures. Is there a way of turning of my HD when not in use? I have tried the windows power management thing but It doesn't want to work for me! Whats going wrong? 

[chiwas]

Open Resource Monitor and kill/disable processes which are accessing your HDD. Also disable indexing on that drive.

[GeorgeKellow]

Just now, chiwas said:

Open Resource Monitor and kill/disable processes which are accessing your HDD. Also disable indexing on that drive.

How would I disable indexing? What does it do?

[Murasaki]

8 minutes ago, GeorgeKellow said:

I use an SSD for my os and other applications and I use my HD just for movies and pictures. Is there a way of turning of my HD when not in use? I have tried the windows power management thing but It doesn't want to work for me! Whats going wrong? 

There isn't any feature in Windows itself that can do that. There could be a program that marks an inactive drive as Offline but not really sure.

[chiwas]

Open control panel > Indexing Options > Modify > uncheck your HDD

 

I'm not sure if windows can completely turn off HDD. Maybe something like this could help you http://www.amazon.com/Kingwin-Switch-Switches-5-25-Inch-HDD-PS6/dp/B00TZR3E70

Edited March 18, 2016 by chiwas

[GeorgeKellow]

5 minutes ago, chiwas said:

Open control panel > Indexing Options > Modify > uncheck your HDD

 

I'm not sure if windows can completely turn off HDD. Maybe something like this could help you http://www.amazon.com/Kingwin-Switch-Switches-5-25-Inch-HDD-PS6/dp/B00TZR3E70

Unchecked, still on

[stconquest]

2 minutes ago, GeorgeKellow said:

Unchecked, still on

I use a SATA/IDE to USB 3.0 adapter for my HDDs.  They sit in a drawer most of the time.  You could buy a dock for your HDD.

 

Unplug it.

 

AsRock X99 motherboards have a feature to turn off the HDD whenever you want.

[Matt100HP]

53 minutes ago, ModuleLFS said:

There isn't any feature in Windows itself that can do that. There could be a program that marks an inactive drive as Offline but not really sure.

Windows most certainly can do it:

 

Control Panel > Hardware and Sound > Power Options > Change Plan Settings > Change Advanced Power Settings > Hard Disk > Turn Off Hard Disk After

 

This turns off the HDD after a user defined amount of time having not been accessed. 

[Murasaki]

17 minutes ago, Matt100HP said:

Windows most certainly can do it:

 

Control Panel > Hardware and Sound > Power Options > Change Plan Settings > Change Advanced Power Settings > Hard Disk > Turn Off Hard Disk After

 

This turns off the HDD after a user defined amount of time having not been accessed. 

Yeah but doesn't that turn off only ALL drives.

[Matt100HP]

11 minutes ago, ModuleLFS said:

Yeah but doesn't that turn off only ALL drives.

It turns drives off after they've been inactive for "X" number of minutes. The laptop I'm typing on now has a 120GB SSD as a boot drive (which is obviously working) and a 750GB mechanical drive where the blu-ray drive used to be. The mechanical drive is currently silent as it's not being used for anything, it only spins up when I access it and then it turns off after 2 minutes of inactivity.  

[Captain_WD]

2 hours ago, GeorgeKellow said:

~snip~

Hey there GeorgeKellow,

What's the drive's brand and model?
A drive should park its head and spin down after certain amount of time of no usage. In order for that to happen the computer shouldn't' make any requests towards the drive. I'd check and see if an application or the OS is making such requests and keeping it spinning. As @chiwas suggested, indexing can also keep the drive spinning so I'd check that too.

Captain_WD.