![]() ![]() When you eventually return to your PC to book some flights, the hard drive will spin up once again. Ten minutes later, the hard drive would stop spinning and all the while you’re eating dinner and watching TV, the hard drive is idle, wasting no electricity and not making any noise. In the above scenario, you would finish playing your game, and go off to have dinner. For example, we could set the idle time to 10 minutes. You could tell your computer that if the hard drive hasn’t been used for a prolonged period, it can be spun down. This is where power-saving features come into play. All that time when the PC wasn’t being actively used (whilst you were eating and then watching TV), energy was being wasted keeping the hard drive spinning. For example, if the computer is a typical home desktop PC, you might finish playing a game, go and eat dinner, watch TV for a couple of hours, and then return to the PC to look up some flights. However, if a computer is only used infrequently, then having the hard drive running constantly is a little bit wasteful. It needs to be running constantly so that it’s ready for action. In the case of a computer being actively used, the above explanation of why a drive runs constantly makes perfect sense. This way, if the computer suddenly requests data from the hard drive, the drive doesn’t need to engage motors, which would cause a delay. slower than purely electronic components), and using motors to spin up the platter takes a few seconds.īecause computers typically expect a hard drive to be ready to send or receive stored data at a moment’s notice, it makes sense for the hard drive to keep its platter constantly spinning. As you might imagine, being a mechanical device, a hard drive is quite slow (i.e. Without getting too technical, a hard drive works by having a spinning platter that holds your data and a moving arm that hovers over the platter reading or writing the data using a magnet. You can consider them to all mean the same thing. With that said, if you’re here because your hard drive is constantly spinning and driving you mad, you’re in the right place, please read on! If on the other hand, you’re a regular reader and full-blown data-hoarder then feel free to ignore this post as I’m sure you’ll find it pretty useless.īefore we get started, I’m going to use the terms “hard drive”, “hard disk”, and “hard disk drive” interchangeably. It turns out that not only was the noise of her drive keeping her awake at night (I gather her PC was in her bedroom), but with the soaring costs of electricity, she was becoming concerned that the hard drive spinning away 24/7 was driving up her energy bills.īeing the kind soul that I am, I, of course, helped her out but then thought if people are finding their way here when searching for solutions to this problem (I’m becoming known as a hard drive aficionado it seems), I should make a dedicated post about it. They’ve usually been searching for a solution to a technical problem they’re having and by some fluke, they’ve found my blog and decided I sound like I might be able to help.Īs you’ve probably guessed, this has happened recently and hence I’m writing this post! About a fortnight ago, a very nice lady got in touch asking if I could help her to stop the hard drive in her computer from constantly running. They’re not digital hoarders, and sometimes not even technically minded. 4.1 How to check hard drive activity with Resource MonitorĮvery once in a while, I’ll receive a message or comment from someone who’s accidentally stumbled upon this blog.4 Hard drive not spinning down when idle?.3.1 Enabling hard drive power saving on Windows.2 Why does a hard drive run constantly?. ![]() ![]() The new greens have load/unload cycles under 100 so far, I did the wdidle fix right away. My two 500gb WD blues are at 48k and 62k hours, two 1gb greens at 46k and 34k, two 2gb greens at only around 4k hours. The load cycle count on one that was probably downloading torrents climbed to 620k before I rectified the situation. I have a couple of greens that I set the idle timeout with wdidle3 to the highest value. If your system "touches" the affected drive once a minute you'll end up with 500K load/unload cycles in about a year. If your system tends to touch the drive frequently (but not frequently enough to prevent the unload timeout from kicking in) you end up with a ridiculous number of head load/unload cycles. As a power saving measure, the head unload timeout is set ridiculously low (like 8 seconds IIRC). It's a known issue with some of the WD Green models. Or maybe it's not what I expect "load/unload" to mean. Maybe the raw value means something else, or needs interpretation. WD-Green 2TB: 31K hours / 500K load/unload (yuck) ![]()
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