Operating System Windows 7 Sleep Mode - Stop Hard Drives Spinning Up? (1 Viewer)

[elsmandino]

Hi there,

I am using Windows 7 in my Standalone Setup.

I already have three hard drives in there and am thinking of getting a fourth.

I let Windows 7 spindown all hard drives after 20 mins of no activity and let mediaportal put the PC into sleep mode after 5 mins of inactivity.

The problem is that every time the PC resumes from sleep, every single hard drive spins up and stays on for five minutes. This does seem a bit wasteful when the PC is constantly waking up and sleeping throughout the day to do all my recording whilst I am not there.

I only record on one of the hard drives, so only this one is used on a regular basis. The second one is used for films and the third for photos etc, so it does seem very wasteful to have them constantly spinning up and down when they are rarely used.

Ultimately, is there any way that I can prevent hard drives from automatically spining up when resuming from sleep - i.e. What I want is for hard drives to sleep until they are needed, regardless of the system itself waking up and going to sleep.

I would assume that this must be possible, but would assume that it involves some additional software or a Windows hack.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks very much.

Alex

 

[hafblade]

Interesting thoughts.
Do they spin up while coming from standby or while the start of MediaPortal?

The following is only an idea. I've not tested this!
I suppose that all will spin up when MediaPortal starts due to the plugins which scan there folders on the hard drive and so on.
If you would prevent MediaPortal Client from starting every time when the pc starts the spinning could stop.

Don't know if there is something to prevent them from spinning up. I suppose that they all only spin up when they are needed by some software.
Furthermore I don't believe that it's such a large power consumption and hard disc decay if they start 10 times a day.

 

[elsmandino]

Hi Hafblade.

Very good point, I thought that it was simply windows resuming from sleep that made hard drives spin up. I shall test tonight with the side of my PC taken off.

I did find this - http://reboot.pro/16267/

It is not absolutely clear, but am I right in thinking that the only way to stop Hard Drives spinning up on resume is to buy WD drive that supports this and also a BIOS that does as well?