SSD as Primary, Spin drive as Secondary with Powerdown?

Hi,

I have an ASUS N76 with capability of hosting two drives. Currently I have a harddrive 7200rpm which is a bit too noisy, mainly when the room is silent and I'm writing something.

I'd like to get your advice: If I upgrade and make the primary drive an SSD drive, and make my spin drive a secondary drive to store large data (movies, backup etc.), so that I will rarely use the secondary drive (once a day for 10 minutes copying/moving files), can I expect the drive to power down and remain in an off state until specifically being used?
Or does Windows have a tendency of activating the drive, e.g. to check free file space, thus freezing the computer and even worse powering up the drive?
Will this increase the wear on my drive?

I am mainly interested in installing an SSD drive for noise reasons, the speed of the spindrive is fine for me.

What do you think?

 

If you are that sensitive to the noise the HDD makes (I used to be there too...), then consider an all SSD solution (240/256GB O/S + Program drive and a 480/512GB or larger Data drive).

You are correct that Windows will randomly power up the HDD when doing it's internal stuff - if you happen to be using the system at that time (depending on what you're specifically doing, of course) then yes, it will seem to 'freeze' - even with a top flight SSD inside. But for maybe 95% of the time - your system should perform as you wish; quickly and quietly.

But still; the SSD only option is the only 'solution' here.



Good luck.

 

Windows has a setting to disable or shutdown non-essential hardware. I believe the default time period is 15 or 20 minutes. After which, the HDD should shut off.

The SSD is a great idea though. You're going to love it. :thumbsup:

 

Thanks for your replies
I decided just to keep my harddrive, as the main problem I wanted to solve was the noise. And 512GB SSD is still a bit too expensive.

 

In advanced settings of windows power plans (win 7) you can set the Hard drive to turn off after 5 minutes, that is the setting I use and only hear it spin up when I open windows explorer, or control panel. My 7200 drive is a low end seagate so I do regular backups to an external drive.