Turning off secondary HDD when needed

Is it possible to turn off secondary HDD when needed?

It's so noisy and I wanted to see if I can turn it off when reading a document or using something from my SSD only

 

If there is data only on it, you can disable the disk from disk management which should prevent it from being accessed at all.

 

What if you set your hard disk to turn-off after 2min in Windows power options. I think the setting applies for both drives and chances are that there's enough activity happening on your SSD so it won't be affected by the setting. As long as no files are being accessed on the secondary drive, it should stay off (at least mine does).

If you really want to spin down your drive on command, you can use "hdparm -Y hdb".

You may have to do a bit of searching to find hdparm for windows. I don't think it's been maintained in a quite a while...

 

hdparm is amazing.. One question.. how do I get it to turn back on?

Will this harm my PC or my drive in any way?

 

I'd get a more silent HD, or replace it with an SSD. They are really getting pretty inexpensive these days.

 

word! ever since i switched to 7970m and all ssd my laptop has been DEAD. fans completely off during idle,temps below 40C and no hdd noise anymore whatsoever. loving it

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The HDD will spin back up as soon as any process try to access it. You'll notice a short delay while the drive spins-up to speed, but it won't be disabled or disapear from windows explorer when it's not spinning. If you're actively using files on the drive, you might find it too annoying to wait for it to spin-up e.g. to open or save a file; the application can appear to hang for a second or so.

Increasing spin-up/down cycles of mechanical devices will certainly increase wear, but as long as it's not excessive I don't think you should be too concerned. If it's constantly spinning up/down every 5min, that's probably not too good. But a duty-cycle of 30min+ might be fine.

 

SSD FTW. Best investment you can make for ANY laptop.

 

Thx for the tips about SSD.. but I already have a SSD

and the HDD is secondary


It's in my sig and the title of the post

 

Is there a way to turn it back on manually using hdparm? It does not turn back on automatically when I need it to

 

Doesn't the drive turn on when you attempt to save something to it? Did you try re-booting?

 

When I use something from D: explorer hangs for 1-2 mins then the drive spins back on and it works

 

Note: I posted before reading another user already suggested hdparm.

# replace /dev/sdX with correct drive letter, ie., /dev/sdb (generally /dev/sda is your main drive)

# put device to sleep mode
hdparm -Y /dev/sdX

# put device to standby mode
hdparm -y /dev/sdX

# change time before drive spins down
# default for most drives is between 60-120 seconds
# this command tells drive to spin down 5 seconds after last read/write
hdparm -S 1 /dev/sdX

hdparm is a program freely available in most all GNU/Linux, and if you use Windows, cygwin includes the hdparm program as well

It will take time for the drive to spin up before you can access files from it, but 1-2 minutes is an awful long time. Is that an exaggerated estimation or does it really take that long? In Arch, after I load my files to RAM on boot I use hdparm the HDD to sleep. In the event I need to access it, files load within 5 seconds in Thunar.

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