Possible to hibernate 2nd HD when not in use?

I have an Intel 310 mSATA as my primary drive and a regular HD as my storage drive. Sometimes when I do web browsing, I don't need the regular mechanical HD. Is it possible to spin it down or put it to sleep when not it's not in use?

I'm hoping to save some power this way when not plugged in.

Thx.

 

I think you could achieve that by setting the "Stop hard disk rotation" setting in Power Manager for your current power plan. Take a look at the screenshot below:

 

I'm trying to do the same thing, but I've been finding that the settings frequently reset themselves. Hopefully you don't come upon that.

 

Thx BlackLion, but is "Stop hard disk rotation" a generic term for all drives? Guess I'll have to test it out when I get home.

 

Might, but it wouldn't really matter since an SSD doesn't need to rotate, so there's nothing to "stop" in the first place. Only the HDD will be affected.

 

Make sure that frequently accessed data is not stored on your hdd. Some programs would regularly access disks even if you're not doing anything.

 

Something I do that has the pleasant side-effect of avoiding frequent hard drive waking is that I have the HDD partition encrypted with TrueCrypt. When it is not mounted, there is no drive letter for services to call upon. Only programs that call on the low-level hardware will wake it -- and today I found out that for some reason, Skype chooses to search for whatever hardware is attached, even if there is no mounted drive letter. That's surely more of a bug than a feature.

 

TrueCrypt trick is very neat indeed.

Thumbs down on Skype though.

I think under Windows, you have option (under Administrative Tools->Disk mgmt ?) to completely disable the disk. I tried that with eSATA disks. The OS actually remember disk's unique id and it won't even mount the disk next time it is plugged it in.

Update : No, it looks like it won't work. non esata disk can't be disabled, at least on my Windows XP VM

 

hdparm allows control of individual drive standby timeout periods to spindown the HDD if it's idle to conserve power. This would be recommended if running a primary bay SSD and optical bay 2.5" HDD at the same time. The commands below are easily added to a batch file to run in Windows startup folder.

1. Download hdparm for Windows.
   
   
2. Identify the drive you wish to operate on:
   
3. Set a batch file to run in startup with standby time of your choice, example 1 min. Refer to the -S parameter in the hdparm commandline options. hdparm can also be used to set drive transfer mode, eg: 'hdparm -X udma5 /dev/sdb'
   

 

None of this is needed for Windows 7. You can use the Control Panel | Power Options to set this. No need to install anything or go to the command line. Really? Windows isn't linux.

ThinkPads also have the ability to use the power management driver that ships installed on the machine, along with Power Manager (previous screenshot). No need to get cryptic with a download and command line argument for that either.

 

None of this is needed. Setting the the hdd to spin down in Power Manager doesn't affect the ssd.

 

Just re-reading, Given the OP has a SSD as primary and HDD as secondary then indeed that will be the solution. If however there were two mechanical HDDs and you wanted to set per-drive standy then would need hdparm due to, afaik, Windows only having a generic all drives standy timeout.

 

That would still be a rare need. You can still set a low threshold value globally and when either of the drives go inactive, they'll sleep like a baby until needed.

What notebook user scenario drives the need for discrete values on each drive?

 

If the user has two mechanical drives - one is the boot drive, so is busy, the other is a data drive. You'd want discrete standby timeouts to prevent the boot drive yoyoing up and down and wearing itself out.

Such a setup is often used with optical bay caddies to extend the storage capacity of a notebook.

If a SSD is the primary then it doesn't care what the standby timeout is, since it doesn't spin down/up.