hi.. im running 2 harddrives.. the primary with the OS and the secondary with mp3s and such. i was wondering if it was safe to unplug the secondary while the computer is running. or if there was a program to manually spindown the harddrive in win XP. ive tried using the auto spindown under power options but i can hear it spin back up every now and then when im not at the computer. i think XP might be using the secondary to cache my downloads or something.

thanks

I would just power down first. What if the disk is accessing something, the head could crash into the platter and produce bad sectors.

There are utilites which montitors which program acesses a file. Would be interesting to see what XP is doing.
Head crash when plugged of is not to be expected. Either there is a spring which pulls the head to the parking position. Or the drive uses it's remaining spinning energy for this operation. I believe the cache could be flushed and you're loosing soma data.

would be interested to hear more about this. A harddrive of mine developed bad sectors when the system powered on and off too quickly.

i've been doing it for years.... mostly inspired from my scsi hot-swap rig i used to have. i haven't had any problems pulling the plug directly. i even thought of an idea of killing the power with customized switch @ 12v.

there is an utility that i used to have with win98se that allowed me to spin down the drive so i can unplug the drive "safely", but to be honest, i think you can kill the power as long as you aren't accessing the drive.

just turn off your mp3 and any program that may be accessing the second drive and kill the power. that's what i used to do (until i got 120gb). only thing that i can think of would cause the drive failure is sudden electrical surge or change that can move the head reader abnormally causing it to touch the actual disk. that would result in bad sector... all my common sense tells me that as long as disk is not being accessed, power loss should not be a problem.

of course, i take no responsibility of my words and whatever you do to your system is at your own risk i'm just merely stating my experience.

I think you can actually set the properties of the drive to "Removeable" in XP. Not sure, but that may then give you some extra stuff on the drive right-click menu...

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Aren't there some Mobile Racks ('Removable Frames') that actually do this? I knwo that some Mobile Racks are 'hot-swapable'. The product information says your motherboard has to 'support' this feature but my guess is all modern motherboards should do this.
So, this devices actually have a power switch, that powers your HDD down, so you can safely remove the frame while your OS of choice is running and reinsert another one and power it up.

I thought about buying a pair of these to exchange data with my girlfriend. Especially the feature to shut down the drive after i got all data I need from the HDD in the frame sounds good.

So if anyone has some experience with hot swapable mobile racks, I'd be interested to hear them.

Especially the compatibility of different racks would interest me.

I've got quite a few mobile racks in my systems. I've never "hot swapped". Half of my MR's have a circuit built in to the key, locked = power on, unlocked = power off, so for those you cannot pull the drive while it is powered, but you could still turn the key during a write, and screw something up...

I've just never felt that the inconvenience of powering down outweighed the drawback of potential drive failure....

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I see. For me there would be no risk of loosing important data since the HDD within the rack would just be kind of a 'better / simpler CD-R', so I'd be really interested if this hot swapping really works... powering down just to get rid of the noisy HDD within the rack or to insert the data i brought from my girlfriends... nah

I wonder, is it possible to put one HD in "sleep" mode while the other is still running??

Yup. The harddrive spin down timing in Windows is independent. If one drive is being used while the other isn't the unused one will spin down. I have a machine here at home that I used for data storage and I can hear the individual drives spin up when they are accessed.

Really? Would that be XP? Cuz I have Win2K only here.

I'd be willing to bet its the same way. I know it was on 98. I don't have any machines here with 2k anymore or I'd test it for you. Although it does seem like I have every other hardware/software configuration known to man.

(At last count I have 9 working machines in the house, not including two laptops. And people wonder why I care about quiet computing??)

I have more . But I don't have any laptops .

Damn, I guess I better start building more then!

Perhaps I should get on my attic and pull out all my antiquities, just to count them! *G* (I'm only 17 but I have pc's that are older than me .. scary)