How do you keep the HDD alive if you using a SSD as your primary boot W

Good day all. Anyone have an idea or guide on how to keep the HDD drive from sleeping so it stays on all the time instead of being woken up and increasing unnecessary counts when data is accessed at times?

I find that increasing count is causing more wear and tear than just keeping the HDD on after boot.

Thanks. I apologise if this thread has been asked or created before. Please forgive me in that regard.

 

Thanks for that but I have tried it and the HDD still sleeps according to HDD Sentinel. The SSD m.2 drive is my boot drive and the HDD secondary. Those settings dont seem to work for the Secondary drive?

 

Try HDDScan or HDparm.
HDDScan:
Launch, Go to Tools/Create Command line, disable APM and save as a bat file.
Autostart* bat file and add it to scheduler** to launch after sleep.
* - create text file with code, change address of bat file, save as .vbs. Put it in the autostart folder (or to the registry of autostart).

Spoiler

Code:

Set WshShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
WshShell.Run chr(34) & "D:\HP\HDD\1.bat" & Chr(34), 0
Set WshShell = Nothing

** - Scheduler trigger is Microsoft-Windows-Diagnostics-Performance, Diagnostics-Performance, 300
P.S. If HDDScan doesn't work then I will write about HDParm.

 

Thank you very much kind sir will try that.

 

Where did you find that waking up from sleep is wearing the drive out? If your drive is a 5400rpm going sleep or idle is safer for the hardware then constant on that will wear it out more. Otherwise check your O/S power settings to for changes.

 

My IT friend said continous count (on/off) can put strain and wear on the heads of the disk than a drive that stays on the whole time on idle. I dont mean the drive must read or write data the whole time, just prefer to stay on idle because when I access content or play a game the drive make a sick noise so I rather it keep on in idle state instead of sleep state as per HDD Sentinel. My Seagate has 60000 Count Limit so I rather not get any close to that. I hope that makes sense

 

I'm using HDPARM to prevent sleep mode as I'm using it as a storage drive and not a Boot drive. Windows Power settings only control the Boot drive if I'm not mistaken

 

OP and his “IT friend” are right, constantly starting and stopping wears out the drive. It’s stressful for the spindle motor. That’s why even in my NAS I disabled spindown. It’s ok for something like an external drive if you only use it occasionally. OP I wouldn’t worry too much though, it will still last quite a while, if you are using a laptop, the power drain will be much higher if the drive is constantly spinning. If on a desktop then go ahead and disable HDD sleep if you like.

Often you will find really old drives in servers working well then suddenly fail to spin back up when disconnected. While on the other hand you will find similar drives fail much earlier with spindown enabled.