Hi everyone. I recently bought a new pc to replace the old one and wish to put the old one's hard disc in the new one. Both support IDE cables. This is easy enough. What I wanted to know is this: Is it possible to adjust the power settings so that the secondary hard disc does not boot or get power unless I manually tell it to? My intentions are to use it as redundant file storage but it is old and I would rather not have the platter spinning, acruing more wear than it needs to. Even if I had to restart my computer to power it up when I wanted to access it, that would be fine as I will rarely need to use it. Any suggestions? (Oh, and I apologize if this is a common question. I did search here and on google but could not find any references to what I wished to do. Assuming it is possible, there's probably a term for this activity that I don't know.) Thanks everyone!
Your best bet would be to put the older drive in an external enclosure. Then you can unplug it and turn it off. Other than that you would have to go into the case and unplug all the cables from it when you don't need it.
you can probably do it using a usb ide bridge adapter. They cost about 20.00. You can place the hard drive in a regular hard drive slot, connect the bridge adapter and power cord to the back of the drive. You have to connect the bridge adapter to an available usb port. Whenever you need to use the drive just plug in the power cord, the drive will then showup like if it's a usb external drive. There's also removable racks available that you can check on http://www.vantecusa.com/front/product/view_detail/158
I also have a second hardrive that I rarely access and was wondering if there was a easier way to keep the second hardrive in a sleep mode for longer life and powerer saving while having my primary hardrive accessible. It is a newer sata HDD. Thanks.
Power options can do this, but you won't have individual control over the hard drives. It will be both on or both off and when you want to access the drives when they are off, you will be subject to the lag of the disk spinning up. Also, I'm on my laptop at work right now so i know that you can do it with a laptopn, but I'm not sure if power options exists on a desktop PC. I will check when I get home tonight.
This seems an oversight to me. I didn't think everyone would be happy having all their drives spinning all the time when your mostly just using one drive. Does a harddrive at least go into a idle mode where it still uses electricity but slows or stop spinning when not accessed for a while? I should think this would at least extend life of HDD some?
Hard drives are designed with the thought and intent that they will be always be spinning when power is on. Hard drive platters spin at speeds up to 15000 RPM and by powering the drives up and down you are asking for a lot of severe start/stop stresses. Just as power up and power down stresses electrical componnts rather than a "solid state" on, the spin up and spin down actually cause more wear and tear than leaving them on all the time. BTW, you can have the disks shut down after a period of time using the power options in the control panel. This is available on a desktop but the setting will take effect for all hard drives.
The suggestions are good re an enclosure or maybe an antiquated type of enclosure that is removable via the fronta case bays. As to discs spinning it's true that constant power-on/off eventually takes it's toll. Discs that are constantly spinning are only at risk if something goes wrong (or if they genuinely fail i suppose); or, if the discs are up and spinning forever (well for years at a time anyways), for instance in a server. I work in the Enterprise sector where servers can be left up and running for years at a time. The longest i ever saw was one server that was up and running permanently for just shy of 3 years!. We knew some of the disks would fail once we shutdown & retsarted the server. Basically my point is that the bearings or whatever they're called seize up if a disk is left up and running forever. I think of it like running out of oil My main pc has 6 hard drives up and spinning the whole time, it does bother me a little however i have backups of every drive in USB 2.0 enclosures that are mostly only powered on as and when changes are made.
