Vista - control spindown of individual hard drives?

Hello-

Having just seen Al Gore's movie , I was hoping to do a few things to save
some greenhouse gas and some money. I have a couple of internal hard drives
in my Vista system that I don't often access (they're for backup purposes.)

I see in Microsoft's Power Options component of Control Panel that I can set
a setting that specified when to spin down all hard drives after a certain
amount of system inactivity. That's not what I want. I want to be able to:

1. individually control which drives should not spin up when the system
boots or returns from sleep

2. individually control a setting for each hard drive that lets me specify
that after a certain amount of inactivity of THAT hard drive, it will be spun
down

Anyone have any idea if this is possible- either through a third party
(hopefully shareware) utility or a registry setting somewhere?

I have a personal Linux server that runs 24x7 - I just set my internal
backup drive in that machine (which is accessed every day for all of ~15
minutes at 4 am for an automated backup) to spin down after the backup is
complete. I read somewhere that a hard drive requires about 7 watts to run.
Might as well turn 'em off when they're not being used...!

Thanks much, AL

This is what seems to happen with my system.

Each individual hard drive will spin down after the time period for "that"
particular hard drive has been satisfied. They do not all spin down at once.
They step as necessary due to the inactivity period. When I do something
that causes access to a particular drive THAT drive will spin up, not all of
them. The times are the same for all drives and is not selective.

--


Regards,

Richard Urban MVP
Microsoft Windows Shell/User


"A L" <AL@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:04A6974E-17A5-420C-B267-76E62B3D5C48@microsoft.com...
> Hello-
>
> Having just seen Al Gore's movie , I was hoping to do a few things to
> save
> some greenhouse gas and some money. I have a couple of internal hard
> drives
> in my Vista system that I don't often access (they're for backup
> purposes.)
>
> I see in Microsoft's Power Options component of Control Panel that I can
> set
> a setting that specified when to spin down all hard drives after a certain
> amount of system inactivity. That's not what I want. I want to be able
> to:
>
> 1. individually control which drives should not spin up when the system
> boots or returns from sleep
>
> 2. individually control a setting for each hard drive that lets me
> specify
> that after a certain amount of inactivity of THAT hard drive, it will be
> spun
> down
>
> Anyone have any idea if this is possible- either through a third party
> (hopefully shareware) utility or a registry setting somewhere?
>
> I have a personal Linux server that runs 24x7 - I just set my internal
> backup drive in that machine (which is accessed every day for all of ~15
> minutes at 4 am for an automated backup) to spin down after the backup is
> complete. I read somewhere that a hard drive requires about 7 watts to
> run.
> Might as well turn 'em off when they're not being used...!
>
> Thanks much, AL
>

That is the way mine act as well. Every once in a while (especially when I
go to save a file, or access My Computer), I can hear my storage hard drive
spin up. Good thing, since it has a lot of information on it, and no sense
in it working all the time when I use it 10% of the time.

--
Dustin Harper
dharper@vistarip.com
http://www.vistarip.com

--
"Richard Urban" <richardurbanREMOVETHIS@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:%23ulYqZdaHHA.4948@TK2MSFTNGP05.phx.gbl...
> This is what seems to happen with my system.
>
> Each individual hard drive will spin down after the time period for "that"
> particular hard drive has been satisfied. They do not all spin down at
> once. They step as necessary due to the inactivity period. When I do
> something that causes access to a particular drive THAT drive will spin
> up, not all of them. The times are the same for all drives and is not
> selective.
>
> --
>
>
> Regards,
>
> Richard Urban MVP
> Microsoft Windows Shell/User
>
>
> "A L" <AL@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
> news:04A6974E-17A5-420C-B267-76E62B3D5C48@microsoft.com...
>> Hello-
>>
>> Having just seen Al Gore's movie , I was hoping to do a few things to
>> save
>> some greenhouse gas and some money. I have a couple of internal hard
>> drives
>> in my Vista system that I don't often access (they're for backup
>> purposes.)
>>
>> I see in Microsoft's Power Options component of Control Panel that I can
>> set
>> a setting that specified when to spin down all hard drives after a
>> certain
>> amount of system inactivity. That's not what I want. I want to be able
>> to:
>>
>> 1. individually control which drives should not spin up when the system
>> boots or returns from sleep
>>
>> 2. individually control a setting for each hard drive that lets me
>> specify
>> that after a certain amount of inactivity of THAT hard drive, it will be
>> spun
>> down
>>
>> Anyone have any idea if this is possible- either through a third party
>> (hopefully shareware) utility or a registry setting somewhere?
>>
>> I have a personal Linux server that runs 24x7 - I just set my internal
>> backup drive in that machine (which is accessed every day for all of ~15
>> minutes at 4 am for an automated backup) to spin down after the backup is
>> complete. I read somewhere that a hard drive requires about 7 watts to
>> run.
>> Might as well turn 'em off when they're not being used...!
>>
>> Thanks much, AL
>>
>

Hi
This is interesting. Do they spin down after a certain amount of inactive
time by the user, or by the disk? I have three drives in my computer, one
that the os, programs, and data are on, one for archiving downloads and
photos, and one that has linux installed, it would be nice if the linux
drive would spin down, but since I run seti@home, I would not want the main
drive to ever spin down.
Thanks for any replies
"A L" <AL@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:04A6974E-17A5-420C-B267-76E62B3D5C48@microsoft.com...
> Hello-
>
> Having just seen Al Gore's movie , I was hoping to do a few things to
> save
> some greenhouse gas and some money. I have a couple of internal hard
> drives
> in my Vista system that I don't often access (they're for backup
> purposes.)
>
> I see in Microsoft's Power Options component of Control Panel that I can
> set
> a setting that specified when to spin down all hard drives after a certain
> amount of system inactivity. That's not what I want. I want to be able
> to:
>
> 1. individually control which drives should not spin up when the system
> boots or returns from sleep
>
> 2. individually control a setting for each hard drive that lets me
> specify
> that after a certain amount of inactivity of THAT hard drive, it will be
> spun
> down
>
> Anyone have any idea if this is possible- either through a third party
> (hopefully shareware) utility or a registry setting somewhere?
>
> I have a personal Linux server that runs 24x7 - I just set my internal
> backup drive in that machine (which is accessed every day for all of ~15
> minutes at 4 am for an automated backup) to spin down after the backup is
> complete. I read somewhere that a hard drive requires about 7 watts to
> run.
> Might as well turn 'em off when they're not being used...!
>
> Thanks much, AL
>

I believe the poster who said that if I have that power setting for hard
drives set to 10 minutes, that each hard drive gets it's own 10 minute timer-
and so after a drive is inactive for 10 minutes, it will spin down. I wish
this were logged somewhere so I could confirm.

I'm having trouble with a PC spontainously coming out of sleep mode too. I
wish Microsoft had a seperate "power" log with all things power related being
logged. It seems that there can be bad drivers and the like that screw up
the power settings. One log just for this stuff in the Event Viewer would be
quite helpful.

"Ward Taylor" wrote:

> Hi
> This is interesting. Do they spin down after a certain amount of inactive
> time by the user, or by the disk? I have three drives in my computer, one
> that the os, programs, and data are on, one for archiving downloads and
> photos, and one that has linux installed, it would be nice if the linux
> drive would spin down, but since I run seti@home, I would not want the main
> drive to ever spin down.
> Thanks for any replies
> "A L" <AL@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
> news:04A6974E-17A5-420C-B267-76E62B3D5C48@microsoft.com...
> > Hello-
> >
> > Having just seen Al Gore's movie , I was hoping to do a few things to
> > save
> > some greenhouse gas and some money. I have a couple of internal hard
> > drives
> > in my Vista system that I don't often access (they're for backup
> > purposes.)
> >
> > I see in Microsoft's Power Options component of Control Panel that I can
> > set
> > a setting that specified when to spin down all hard drives after a certain
> > amount of system inactivity. That's not what I want. I want to be able
> > to:
> >
> > 1. individually control which drives should not spin up when the system
> > boots or returns from sleep
> >
> > 2. individually control a setting for each hard drive that lets me
> > specify
> > that after a certain amount of inactivity of THAT hard drive, it will be
> > spun
> > down
> >
> > Anyone have any idea if this is possible- either through a third party
> > (hopefully shareware) utility or a registry setting somewhere?
> >
> > I have a personal Linux server that runs 24x7 - I just set my internal
> > backup drive in that machine (which is accessed every day for all of ~15
> > minutes at 4 am for an automated backup) to spin down after the backup is
> > complete. I read somewhere that a hard drive requires about 7 watts to
> > run.
> > Might as well turn 'em off when they're not being used...!
> >
> > Thanks much, AL
> >
>
>