Ultimate hard drive silencing

widowmaker · Post by **widowmaker** » Mon Mar 31, 2008 9:29 pm

Hey everyone, first time poster.

I thought I'd share with you all what I've done after getting annoyed by noisy hard drives. My solution was quite simple. I decided to get 2 drives. A primary 160gb 2.5 inch notebook sata drive and a storage 250gb 3.5 inch drive. The way I have it setup is as follows:

2.5 inch drive suspended in a 5.25 bay (5,400 rpm)
partitioned as follows:
-45gb strictly for Windows XP installation
-10gb for program files
-50gb for frequently accessed storage
-almost 50 gb for games installation

3.5 inch drive suspended in 5.25 bay (7,200 rpm)
-full 250gb for archiving less frequently accessed data
-set to power down after 3 minutes of inactivity through windows power options

The only things that concern me at the moment is the life expectancy of the 250gb drive. Every time I power on my computer, that drive powers up and shortly after logging into Windows it powers off (from inactivity). For some god awful reason it also needs to power up just before I shut down the computer. I imagine that most of the drive's wear will come from this minimum two-time up-down cycle between system power on and power off. I found that this setup is giving me a lot of storage with a lot less noise. I'm curious to hear everyone's input on what I've done here.

widowmaker · Post by **widowmaker** » Mon Mar 31, 2008 9:30 pm

I needed at least 1 post to post urls so:

hiower · Post by **hiower** » Tue Apr 01, 2008 1:49 am

If the drive just powers up and down twice a day or so, i doubt it will be that much of a problem. What would worry me is a 3min power down for a drive I'd use more than a few times a day. Especially if it would power up/down several times during a "use".

This poses two questions for me.
-Is it possible to manually power on and off drives?
-If, say a mp3 song gets loaded into memory from the drive, and plays for 4min, will the drive power down? Or is it still counted on as "in use"?

widowmaker · Post by **widowmaker** » Tue Apr 01, 2008 8:30 am

I've been looking for ways to manually power up and down my drives but so far I haven't seen a convenient software solution. The only thing I can think of is physically pulling the sata cable while the computer is still on using sata's supposedly safe hot swap feature. I'm uncomfortable with that though.

I've tested the mp3 playlist in winamp 5.32 and it does indeed need to spin up the drive everytime a new song is played (assuming your song is 3+ minutes). After 3 minutes into the first song the HD will power off. Several seconds before the next song, winamp will infact freeze and pause audio while the hd powers back up to cache the song into memory. When fully powered back up, the song finishes and seemlessly goes onto the second song. This is obviously unacceptable. I've tried this on an avi file and the hard drive seems to say powered on throughout the movie.

What I tend to do now is store everything in my powered down drive and whenever I have something that i'd be access frequently, i'd just move it over to the 2.5inch drive in a 1 time transfer. I store all my music on the 2.5.

fjf · Post by **fjf** » Tue Apr 01, 2008 1:33 pm

What about an esata drive with on-off switch?

JLee · Post by **JLee** » Tue Apr 01, 2008 2:47 pm

fjf wrote:What about an esata drive with on-off switch?

qft

going to do this and/or NAS for next setup

hiower · Post by **hiower** » Tue Apr 01, 2008 3:24 pm

widowmaker wrote:I store all my music on the 2.5.

Have you thought about making it 8 or 10min instead of 3 ? That way at least most songs should finish and the HD be read from again before it powers down. And face it, you will probably not hear the harddrive while you are playing music

widowmaker · Post by **widowmaker** » Tue Apr 01, 2008 9:11 pm

True. I use Grado SR80 headphones too, however I'd rather keep my frequently accessed files on a single drive and power up the archiving drive only when necessary.

alecmg · Post by **alecmg** » Wed Apr 02, 2008 3:58 am

under linux hdparm makes it very easy to manually power on and off and also set arbitrary powerdown times

What I noticed under WinXP64 tho, is that when drive powers up, everything else in system stops for a second or two - mouse, sound stutters, screen. Very annoying