Turn off HD in power options

[808smokey]

Hi,
Does anyone do this? I'm sure this has been posted before but can't find it. I Always see it customers computers set to 30 minutes and just wonder, why? Does it "hurt" the drive to turn it on and off? What does it really do? Just stop it from spinning? IF that's the case wouldn't it just spin/stop/spin/stop all the time?

[adam]

Whatever it does, I assume it makes the HD use less power, which is the point. If you aren't using the computer why run up your electricity bill with it? Or if you are on a notebook, why waste your battery?

I would imagine that "waking" up your hard drives is no more damaging then booting up.

[rallynavvie]

Takes a few seconds to spool up, that's why they don't power off all the time. It's said that drives built for constant running don't like being shut off at all, so maybe not such a good idea for SCSI drives. I wonder if there's a way to keep the SCSI drives in my PC running and let the IDE drives power down.

[ViRaL1]

I wonder if there's a way to keep the SCSI drives in my PC running and let the IDE drives power down.

Is your SCSI controller onboard or a card?

[rallynavvie]

Both are host adapters. Surprisingly few workstation boards have onboard SCSI these days. The option would be in XPs power settings anyway. Unless there's an advanced version of that I'm missing somewhere that allows you to set the drives individually.