• Keep HDD awake always?
    9 replies, posted
Hey, I have 3 hard drives, 3rd hard drive is kind of old-ish and only has like 25 mb/s reading speed and is not used that much. But whenever I want to use it like browse files, or save something to it, it takes about 5 seconds to wake up, I can hear it spin up and then it works, I noticed if some program is constantly using it then it doesn't go into sleep mode. Any Windows setting to make sure it's always awake?
If you go to the advanced power settings there is a timer setting on when HDDs should sleep. Put it to 0. [editline]7th January 2015[/editline] If you ask me though, the extra noise and power consumption is not really worth it.
[QUOTE=Warship;46876094]If you go to the advanced power settings there is a timer setting on when HDDs should sleep. Put it to 0.[/QUOTE] Thanks, got it. Does it affect system in any way other than drawing more power during idle?
There's a setting you can change but there's also an chance that it's an function build into the hard drive. Just go to the energy settings in windows and customize it. You should find something related to hard drive sleep timer or something.
[QUOTE=KinderBueno;46876099]Thanks, got it. Does it affect system in any way other than drawing more power during idle?[/QUOTE] In some cases, it might wear the drives more if they run for a long time instead of powering down and back up once in a while...But that depends a lot on the drive and for how long you run your computer etc.
Apparently it's exactly the opposite, at least so I read some time ago. Getting the platter moving is the most stressful moment for the motor, and does cause more wear to the drive rather than keeping it running it all times.
Yeah that's probably the case in most cases. Except for when running a budget harddrive that was not designed to run 24/7, 24/7 I guess.
[QUOTE=Warship;46877538]Yeah that's probably the case in most cases. Except for when running a budget harddrive that was not designed to run 24/7, 24/7 I guess.[/QUOTE] I have 5+ year old consumer drives that have been on 80+% of their lives. The drive will probably live long enough to need replacing for capacity reasons before it actually fails, unless you really abuse your drives. Of course, backup backup backup.
Well, see the situation is: First Drive: Brand New (2 months old) - WD Black 1TB (This is split into two partitions, 150GB OS and the rest is just for downloads/games. Second Drive: Brand New (2 months old) - WD Black 1TB (For Steam and Programs) Third Drive: Got it from previous owner, I bought this PC about 3 years ago, it had G860 Pentium, 750W, and this one Hard Drive 320 GB, so I can only guess it's age is about ~4-5 Years. About 4 months ago I did upgrade stripping everything and leaving only PSU and RAM modules, the rest was replaced, main trigger for this was that Hard Drive was only working at ~5-10 Mb/s speed which caused massive OS loading and games loading times. So now I use it just as side kick for downloads which are not in hurry and saving some general files/photos. But when I want to access it, it takes time to spin up again and read data, I noticed if something is constantly using it - it doesn't go to sleep. Problem with your solutions I found is that all 3 HDD's don't go to sleep, even if I go off PC they will remain up. Is it possible to make just that 1 drive non-sleepy?
Oh, well that makes things a bit more complicated. Maybe there exists a registry hack or some special software that lets you control drive sleep timers individually, but my knowledge ends here.
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