Anyone know of some software that can instantly shut down a drive?

I've set Windows to turn off hard disks after 3 minutes... but sometimes it would be nice to just click something and have my WD (backup drive) shut up. It has the most annoying high pitch 'fridge' sound.

I use an automated backup program to copy stuff to the WD when I shut down the PC at the end of the day. So to reboot/plugin WD/backup/unplug WD would be a bit annoying.

I can live with waiting 5mins for Windows to shut down... I just kick myself everytime I empty the recycle bin and hear the WD whine back up.

I have considered a drive enclosure thing. But for my Barracuda, not for the WD. When the WD finally shuts off, it's pretty much silent.
But the Barracuda is left doing all the work and makes a ton of noise.

I've looked and looked and can't find any "shut down drive" software... so I guess I'll just have to live with waiting for Windows to shut down the WD.
Blablabla.

I've asked this question about power down utilities a number of times in the past. The answer I always get is that unless you have a SCSI drive then you won't be able to send instant power down commands to individual drives.

The exception may be Seagate drives. Though I haven't tried it yet, the Seagreen utility at Seagate's site seems to claim to be able to do this.

You can try a utility called Hard disk sleeper which you can find here. It's a bit outdated though. I tried it quickly but it crashes when I try to start it (WinXP). Don't have the time now anymore to figure it out. I did notice some stuff in the helpfile about issues with NT and some command line switches. Give it a try.

Allrighty.. I got it working and it does make your hd power down on a mouseclick..
A tip.. the file hdsleep.exe you download is selfextracting, rename it to something else before executing it. It turned out they also put a file called hdsleep.exe in the package. So when it extracts, it ruins the program exe.

Thank you thank you!

I'll try it.

It's a demo version. You can only run it for 30 days. And it didn't work so well for me with XP Pro.

I couldn't get it to work at all (XP).
It didn't do anything when I clicked spin down.

I'll keep looking and see if I can find a newer program that does the same thing.

Well, the author is probably out of bussiness since his homepage doesn't exist anymore and the utility dates from 3 years ago or something. You can simply download some keys for it from 'certain' websites with a clear consience.

But strange that it does work for me. Perhaps it's not the OS but the brand or type of harddisks that makes the difference. I got 2 maxtors and 1 WD (shudder), it worked on all 3. Btw, my XP has the latest service pack and all updates.
Perhaps there are newer versions of this utility floating around.

u can set the recycle bins sharing accross partions/drives somewhere i think..
i only have single drive pcs, well ive got a raid 0 in other pc but..