Question Programmable Controller to “Spin Down” Idling Storage HDDs?

soundtrek

Distinguished
Oct 11, 2009
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My next tower build will be used often with my home theater system to play BD movies via JRiver player (after decryption). Running Windows 10, it will have an AMD Ryzen 5 or 7 65 watt TDP or Intel Comet Lake Xeon 80 watt TDP processor.

The OS will be on an SSD and there will be one 2.5” or 3.5” 1 TB storage HDD. And there will be an internal or external optical BD drive.

Of course, I’d want this home theater pc to run as coolly and quietly as possible, while not having the storage hard drive needlessly spinning.

So are there hard drive controllers which can be programmed to power off or to “spin down” to a very low rpm-or to a dead stop, if that is safe?

Of course, I’d be backing up data from that HDD at regular intervals to my server.

If there are such controllers how reliable and essentially “crash proof” are they?

Any widely used brands/models?
 

soundtrek

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Oct 11, 2009
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USAFRet

Titan
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Holy cow, for what do I deserve such great news, for a change? Thanks a lot for this, though as you probably surmise I’m still on Windows 7-and I don’t even know if it has that feature. Not that it will soon matter much but does Windows 7 have it? And XP?
Yes, that exists in Win 7 as well.
And while I have not messed with XP for many years, I believe there as well.