Power down secondary internal HDD?

If I have a secondary internal HDD, how can I power it down (no spinning/off completely) and just run the primary drive?

I have an Asus N73Jq with two bays. I'd like to put in an SSD as the primary and then move the original HDD over to the spare bay. But I would like to mostly use the machine with only the SSD, turning on the HDD only as needed.

In my case, I don't see an option in the BIOS at this time to disable a drive. Anyways, using Windows 7 to turn it off or on as needed would be much better.

Thanks!

 

There is an option called Turn off hard disk after. Just open up the Power Options, click Change plan setting for the currently used plan and open Change advanced power settings. You'll find that option under the Hard disk item.
I am too using this feature (having a second regular HDD in the bay) and this feature is working quite well for me.

 

So, as long as you are not accessing any data on the secondary, it stays off? The setting applies to both drives, right? How many minutes did you choose?

Thank you!

 

I'd say the turn off time is up to you but a HDD has the most wear during spin up/down and not during continuous spin, so it's a trade off between wear and battery

 

It does take a lot of power to spin-up (power back on) also besides the wear, I just leave both on at all times. Try setting it to something like 3 minutes and see if there's any diff. in battery lifetime. I think it powers back on everytime you open windows explorer.

 

1) Yes, correct.
2) Yes, but really only affects the regular (rotating) HDD's and not SSD's.
3) Mine is set to 10 mins and stays off most of the time since I primarily use this drive to store rarely used content like movies, music, photos, etc.

 

you can manually turn it off with this program
Drive Power Manager website

 

This makes sense. Ideally, I'd just leave the secondary drive off most of the time, keeping my working data on the SSD, accessing the HDD only to retrieve and store large files or do system backups.

Currently I use an SD card that I just keep in its slot for backing up docs and stuff, so I could keep doing that.

The utility mentioned does not claim, in its description, to be able to keep the drive off.

I'm pretty surprised my Asus BIOS doesn't have that option, at least that I could find.

Thanks, all!