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Shut down hard drive
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? |
#2
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Shut down hard drive
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#4
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Shut down hard drive
wrote:
GlowingBlueMist wrote: wrote: 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. 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. 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. -- Chuck F ) ) Available for consulting/temporary embedded and systems. http://cbfalconer.home.att.net USE maineline address! |
#5
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Shut down hard drive
wrote in message oups.com... 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 PanelPower Options. I could be wrong. ~e. |
#6
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Shut down hard drive
visions of effty wrote:
wrote in message oups.com... 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 PanelPower 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. -- John McGaw [Knoxville, TN, USA] http://johnmcgaw.com |
#7
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Shut down hard drive
On Wed, 30 Aug 2006 10:25:42 -0500, "GlowingBlueMist"
wrote: wrote: 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. Do you just switch them off, or do you kill the USB connection first with "Safely Remove Hardware" applet? |
#8
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Shut down hard drive
"John McGaw" wrote in message .. . visions of effty wrote: wrote in message oups.com... 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 PanelPower 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. 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. -- John McGaw [Knoxville, TN, USA] http://johnmcgaw.com |
#9
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Shut down hard drive
John McGaw wrote:
.... 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. -- Chuck F ) ) Available for consulting/temporary embedded and systems. http://cbfalconer.home.att.net USE maineline address! |
#10
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Shut down hard drive
visions of effty wrote:
"John McGaw" wrote in message .. . visions of effty wrote: wrote in message oups.com... 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 PanelPower 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. 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. -- John McGaw [Knoxville, TN, USA] http://johnmcgaw.com 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... -- John McGaw [Knoxville, TN, USA] http://johnmcgaw.com |
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