How to idle a rarely used HDD

[windranger]

On my desktop PC, beside the main HDD with the master-partition I also use a separate HDD which I actually access quite rarely, say once a week.

So I want to know if there's any application utility out there which can let me stop the HDD when I don't need it running and restart it when I need it.
I want to reduce both the overall power consumption and the wear of the disk.

Thanks.

 

[hairystuff]

In XP there's "Power Options" in "Control Panel", in Win7 theres a" Power Options" in "Control Panel" aswell, I think you have to go to the "Change Advance Settings" option for the HDD settings in Win7.

 

[windranger]

Thanks, I use W7 but unfortunately the control panel power options doesn't allow such fine tunings...

 

[Hawkeye22]

The power options in both have a "spin down drive after xxx minutes". If the drive is idle, it should spin down.

 

[hairystuff]

I just checked on win7 and they do (I'll try and go step by step for you):

Click "Start"
Click "Control Panel"
on "View By" select "Small icons"
Click "Power Options"
on your selected "Prefered plans", Click "Change plan settings"
Click "Change advance power settings"
Double Click "Hard disk"
Double Click "Turn hard disk off after"
Click the "Settings (Minutes)" Box
Click the "UP" or "DOWN" Arrows to set the idle time
Click "Apply"
Click "OK"

And you should be done.

 

[windranger]

Best answer selected by windranger.

 

[windranger]

OK, thanks, I'll go with this.

 

[Dark Lord of Tech]

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