Disabling HD in windows XP

I have 2 drives a normal HD and a SSD.

I want to disable the HD completely to save energy (XP is installed on the SSD)

I went to "device manager" and disabled the HD BUT I hear and feel the HD is still running.

How to COMPLETELY turn off the HD ?


This is a MSI U115 , there is a ECO function that can turn off the HD but this function does not work anymore.

 

http://www.softlookup.com/display.asp?id=9315

The real question is why the ECO function doesn't work any more. Is there something more endemic going on? Also, are you sure nothing's being read from the drive at all? No swap files or anything configured on that drive?

 

I went to the link you gave but I can't even start a trial version of that software, the software is from 1999 and the company doesn't exist anymore, only works for 95,98 and NT.

Can I not disable the HD myself in the BIOS ? How to do that ?

 

Even if you disable it--ie, cut the data connection between your computer adn windows, you will not disable the power to the drive. If it is connected, it will spin up and consumer battery.

If you want to prevent this, remove the drive.

 

Exactly, I found this software that cuts off power and puts the HD at sleep, worked on my desktop but not yet on my laptop

http://revosleep.realspooky.de


How can I be ckeck that I don't have anu file opened and/or file sharing on the HD I want to shut down ?

 

Are you certain it shuts off power? I don't think it does. I read through the forum and while it puts the drive to sleep, it doesn't actually turn the drive off.

It is kind of neat--it seems to access the sleep function on a per drive basis, but I don't see that it actually disables the drive. In fact it seems to access the drive's sleep function through the windows storage driver (pciide*.sys)

That means that at least part of windows has to load to turn the drive back off. So, I can see where you might save your self some battery time, the drive still will spin up through the start process before being told to sleep (some configurations setting?). And even while asleep, it will still draw some power (just not much).

Still, neat find.

 

When at sleep, how much power will it draw ?

What is the typically power draw when spinning idle ?

 

It will vary from drive to drive.

Here's one guys experience

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/04/how-much-power-does-my-laptop-really-use.html

I used to have a killowatt before I dropped it, and those numbers are very close to my old sager np5680. That was an old machine, though.

That said, today's laptops are much more power efficient so you can expect better numbers today. His point--that putting a drive to sleep wasn't of much value, might not hold quite as much water as when he did his experiment.

What likely still holds true, though, is that the CPU and the LCD draw most of the power

 

According to this test , power consumption goes from 7.4 to 3.4 Watt when disabling the HD , that's HUGE relatively speaking..

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-MSI-Wind-U115-Hybrid-Luxury-Netbook.18464.0.html

 

That is not what that says. First, it says that power usage was halved when disabling the battery from the FN key combination. So, we can assume a power savings from 7.4 W to 3.7 W. It is only after applying all energy saving options that you reduce to 3.4 W.

That would seem to indicate that the harddrive, when completely disabled, uses 3.7W, but that results from a FN key combination, which are sometimes (not always) bios driven.

It is quite possible that MSI built a "switch" into this model to turn off power to the drive (essentially removing it).

That is not the same thing as your programs, which is attempting to put it to sleep. I did do some spec digging, though, and found one drive power comsumption rating.

At idle, the Samsung HD083GJ uses 4.4 watts, and at sleep, the comsumption drops to .7 watts...a 3.7 watt decrease. That is pretty substantial, but I don't know what it means in terms of time.

Here's an easier way to figure it out.

Run a laptop under normal use with the drive in. Recharge. Run the laptop with the drive out.

Honestly, you work so hard at some things. Do you always do things the hard way?

 

What I don't understand is why so few netbooks use a SSD since on those power consumption makes a huge difference ..

 

Number 1- cost
Number 2- capacity
Number 3--durability/reliability

 

Looks like we are both wrong on the numbers regarding savings from turning the HDD off.

According to this test it is only 1.7 Watt

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiOD2GLTcMo&feature=related

 

Well, that is more in line with what I would have expected...but again, this is going to differ from drive to drive, laptop to laptop.

 

Gerry,


Any idea how much a typical SSD consumes ?

Is an SSD less reliable, durable than a HDD ?

 

For question 1, read here:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-hard-drive,1968.html

My experience is close to this--I had two identical netbooks and there was no appreciable difference between them.

For question 2--it depends. Drop a ssd harddrive and it is more reliable since physical damage is less likely, but during the first few years SSDs have been less reliable.

Things seem to be improving, but I would not use a SSD as a primary data holder without good, frequent backups

 

I guess since 2 years things have become better for SSD's regarding power consumption ?