[SOLVED] How do you manually spin down a hard drive?

[notsofast307]

I have an extra 4TB WD Black Caviar Hard Drive that I now use for cold storage. I store old gaming videos and extra games that I do not normally play so I don't have to redownload the game later on if I want to play it. I have a 500 GB M.2 drive to run the games off of and do not play games directly off my Hard Drive.

Since I do not use my hard drive it just spins and makes a lot of noise for no reason and it is irritating. I was wondering if there was a way to manually spin down the drive while I'm still using my computer to cut down on background noise.

 

[popatim]

HDDscan had a spindown option but I'm not sure if its still there.

In Windows Advanced power management, you can a set an inactivity duration to tell it how long to wait before the HDD sleeps/turns off.

 

[tennis2]

Aggressive Link Power Management

And/Or

In Windows power options, "put hard disks to sleep after...."

 

[notsofast307]

HDDscan had a spindown option but I'm not sure if its still there.

In Windows Advanced power management, you can a set an inactivity duration to tell it how long to wait before the HDD sleeps/turns off.

I have it set to 1 minute and it still keeps spinning even though I have no programs downloaded or running on it .

 

[Mr.Spock]

maybe a bit more than you need, but putting in a hot swap bay would seem to fit your bill

I have an extra 4TB WD Black Caviar Hard Drive that I now use for cold storage. I store old gaming videos and extra games that I do not normally play so I don't have to redownload the game later on if I want to play it. I have a 500 GB M.2 drive to run the games off of and do not play games directly off my Hard Drive.

Since I do not use my hard drive it just spins and makes a lot of noise for no reason and it is irritating. I was wondering if there was a way to manually spin down the drive while I'm still using my computer to cut down on background noise.

 

[popatim]

Keep in mind that other application will access the drive beside the stuff you installed there.

Run Resource Monitor as admin, go to the disk tab, and expand the center Disk Activity section.
This is where you can see what is accessing the disk; unless you have a rootkit or virus...