How to turn hard drives on and off ?

I'm running a number of machines which have spare hard drive capacity. I would like to install say 2 extra drives which could be powered up and down on demand. There would be no need to have them powered all the time producing extra heat.

any thoughts on a software way of simply turning these extra internal drives on and off ? or would it be better to set a switch at the rear of the machine to supply or cut power ?

 

Do you mean sorta like having three drives set as master with power switches to control which one powers up to boot from.

Or one master and slaves?

Hmmm, never really thought about it and don't really know but sounds interesting.

I just plug/unplug one of the several sata/ide drives I have for this machine as to what I feel like using.

 

There is Command Line programs which can disable Windows hardwares. I found it on WSF. Sadly I can't find that anymore. I try to seek it again.

MikeNAS

 

Was it DevCon?

 

Maybe you could try revoSleep?

 

I just set mine up in the power options to spin the drives down after a certain length of time....1 hour in my case. My main drive rarely spins down because it is always doing something but my second drive is spun down most of the time and if I need to do something with it, it spins back up almost instantly. I haven't had any issues doing it this way.

 

Yes Sir! Thanks!

 

Long View, how much up and down on demand are we talking about here?

Also are you going to use SATA?

 

Thanks for the replies everyone. I have a number of spare drives - mostly sata and would only be turning them on or off to make backups - store duplicate data - so a drive might be on once a week. Even with cooling my drives run at 30*c in a room which is 19*c If I use spare bays then I would expect 40*C + and can see no reason for having this extra heat being produce all the time if the drive is only being used every 10 days or so.

Have looked at the software solutions but still wonder if taking power to a switch at the back of the pc would be better. what happens to a drive if you just cut the power ? Isn't that what normally happens ?

so imagine a 300 gig sata connected internally with power routed via a switch at the rear of the pc. Or would it be better to use software to turn an individual drive off or put into idle ?

 

Consider using a hot-swappable bay.

 

SATA= Hot Plug

No need to turn on and off

 

Have given up on these extra internals. Have just used up 3 of the 5.25 bays at the front to install a slow 120 fan to cool MB Memory and chips. I think I will now have to investigate using these spare drives in a network box.

 

If these are SATA, why aren't you just doing Hotplug?

 

Hi all,

I've been using this application from Local Cooling

http://www.localcooling.com

Cheers Webby

 

The only option which makes any sense in this case,which is the result of initial faulty cooling,is from Lucas.

Yes SATA is hot pluggable-but who is going to take off the case side and fumble around for the plugs just to turn the power on and off
Predictably the only solution is improving the cooling

 

Makes perfect sense if hard drive manufacturers would have also added a turn off/spinn down switch to these drives, but who knows, maybe someday.

 

I just found this:

hd10w

 

Thanks Mike, it looks promising in the long run but it's beta and their warning raises concerns. I would like to see this better fashioned and even a front end applied to it.

Still might be worth keeping a close eye on. We all need something like this since HD makers obviously completely overlooked the need for something useful as this.

EASTER

 

Do you run with the side panels open? That's the only way a HDD built-in on/off switch could be useful. For the rest of us, hot-swappable bays and external enclosures do the job.