independant power switch for drives?

[titch]

hi guys im new here so thought id say hello first

im wondering if anyone could help me with my setup,

ive got 4hds in my system

1x maxtor sata 1 (os)

2x wdc sata 1 (storage)

1x wdc pata (music)

i rarely access the 3 drives other than the o drives so was considering some modding and wanted a bit of help.

im thinking of adding a manual switch on the the front of my case which will allow me to turn off power to the 3 extra drives and hopefully make my life quiter.


my questions are:

does anyone no which of the 4 molex cables i need to cut (i assume only 1 but maybe all 4)

how safe is this? can i damage my drives if i power them up with the system running? or will they just obvously not be recognised?

if i was to purchase sata ii drives, if i powered up the drives while the sytem was on would they be recognised as ive heard sata ii is hot swappable

if anyone has any info on this whatsoever i would greatly appreciate it

thanks in advance and ill keep you posted

[sareiodata]

I have 1 WD sata hdd for OS and another PATA for storage(the last one is really noisy ). What I did was to setup the hdd to stop after 3 minutes.
In windows you go to :
Display properties / Screen Saver / Power / Turn off hdd : after 3 min.

Other then that you just have to make sure that the programs you have installed do not access the 3 hdd.

I know it's not what you asked for....but it works for me and might work for you to.

[Longwalker]

how safe is this? can i damage my drives if i power them up with the system running? or will they just obvously not be recognised?

This is completely unsafe unless you're using SATA drives with hot swap support. Kill the power to a running PATA disk when the motherboard is still running and you will kill the drive. Unless specially designed, modern semiconductor circuits do not like being fed control signals (e.g. what comes over an IDE cable) without power present.