- Jan 10, 2012
- 26
- 0
- 18,530
Hey folks,
this might be an obvious question so excuse my ignorance. I have been using the Windows setting to turn off hard drives after x minutes of being idle for years, and it worked flawlessly most of the time. Since I was employing external drives, I could easily check if they were spun down by grabbing the enclosure (no vibration = powered down).
After years of postponement, I have finally coughed up the money to invest in a proper NAS (HP ProLiant MicroServer N40L currently running Win7 x64) with two 10TB drives, Seagate Enterprise Capacity ST10000NM0016 and WD "White" WD100EZAZ (shucked from a My Book). The NAS runs 24/7 and I have noticed that the Power-On Hours value in CrystalDiskInfo has increased far too much compared to the actual time I had activity on the drives. I wrote down the values around midnight and when I checked again at noon, both drives' Power-On Hours value had increased by exactly 12 hours. So the question arises, does the counter continue despite the drives being powered down? At least I noticed that it takes a couple of seconds when I select the Seagate drive in Crystal (with the program entering the "not responding" stage), and there is a noticeable noise so I assume that it is indeed being spun up. Unfortunately I cannot make the same observations for the WD drive.
Is there a more elaborate way of checking if drive spin down works?
this might be an obvious question so excuse my ignorance. I have been using the Windows setting to turn off hard drives after x minutes of being idle for years, and it worked flawlessly most of the time. Since I was employing external drives, I could easily check if they were spun down by grabbing the enclosure (no vibration = powered down).
After years of postponement, I have finally coughed up the money to invest in a proper NAS (HP ProLiant MicroServer N40L currently running Win7 x64) with two 10TB drives, Seagate Enterprise Capacity ST10000NM0016 and WD "White" WD100EZAZ (shucked from a My Book). The NAS runs 24/7 and I have noticed that the Power-On Hours value in CrystalDiskInfo has increased far too much compared to the actual time I had activity on the drives. I wrote down the values around midnight and when I checked again at noon, both drives' Power-On Hours value had increased by exactly 12 hours. So the question arises, does the counter continue despite the drives being powered down? At least I noticed that it takes a couple of seconds when I select the Seagate drive in Crystal (with the program entering the "not responding" stage), and there is a noticeable noise so I assume that it is indeed being spun up. Unfortunately I cannot make the same observations for the WD drive.
Is there a more elaborate way of checking if drive spin down works?
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