Windows 'auto turn off hard disk' setting - enable or disable?

AusWolf · Aug 2, 2023

There's a feature in the Windows power settings menu that turns off your HDD after X amount of unused time.

The advantage of it is decreased noise, heat and power consumption when the HDD is not in use.
The disadvantage of it is your HDD turns off and on again as different processes need it for something.

What's your take on it? Yay or nay?

pavle · Aug 2, 2023

Nay; it has to get back to its 120 rotations per one second and I don't see any benefit in such bearing loading power savings. Keep 'em rollin'. Just keep them cool and they'll last.

Telstar · Aug 2, 2023

Too many start cycles are not healthy for the disc. i would keep it off.

umeng2002 · Aug 8, 2023

I always turned it off when I had spinnies. Bearings wear the most when you change rotational speed. If you keep the rotational speed constant, they last a very very long time.

FoulOnWhite · Aug 8, 2023

If i use a USB external for a spinny, will i be able to set it on/off on that?

Shihab · Aug 8, 2023

Nay.
Spin downs have their use cases, but in my opinion, for a typical user, a disk that spin downs long enough to have gains outweigh wear/risks is probably better off being unplugged and manually connected on-demand.

FoulOnWhite · Aug 8, 2023

All the time my PC is on, the drive is on in the USB EXT caddy, just not sure if it is spinning all the time.

Selaya · Aug 9, 2023

had it on all the time, w/ the timeout set to 1mins.
but i accessed those spinning rust maybe twice a week or so, they were mainly for archival purposes.
that is, until i finally threw away all my spinning rust.

AusWolf · Aug 9, 2023

Selaya said:
... until i finally threw away all my spinning rust.

I did that too at one point, but I recently got an 8 TB spinner for £120. No SSD can still beat this, unfortunately.

Mussels · Aug 9, 2023

AusWolf said:
There's a feature in the Windows power settings menu that turns off your HDD after X amount of unused time.

The advantage of it is decreased noise, heat and power consumption when the HDD is not in use.
The disadvantage of it is your HDD turns off and on again as different processes need it for something.

What's your take on it? Yay or nay?

Windows/software wise, unless its a laptop you can likely raise that setting to a higher level and never have issues.
The only negative is powered up mech drive noise on drives that are rarely accessed, and increased risk of damage if they're knocked while spinning (laptops, or external 2.5" drives left hanging in weird places)

If you use SSD's exclusively, it hardly matters since they 'power up' so fast.
Mech drives from a full power down can be quite slow and cause a pretty solid 2-3 second hang on a PC and they'll often stagger power up cycles so if you have 5 drives, they'll power one at a time and extend that duration. I have 8 4TB external drives, connecting them via a hub was quite musical to listen to... and annoying to wait for

Modern hard drives have firmware timers that over-rides the software one, or does something entirely different
Windows/software setting truly parks the heads, while the firmware ones may aim for a halfway state (WD's intellipark has a landing zone away from the platters, but not fully parked like offline states)
WDs green drives had a 7 second timer that basically killed them as an OS drive or in a NAS, both in terms of performance and lifespan despite intelliparks intention of being safer on wear and tear than true parking.

For WD, WDidle3 is a basic exe file that can alter that setting
Hacking WD Greens (and Reds) with WDIDLE3.exe | TrueNAS Community

IIRC seagate drives had it called AAPM or something similar, and one of the HD benching programs like crystaldisk could alter it

csendesmark · Aug 11, 2023

Set it to only turn it off after a longer period, like 3 hours, so in case you forgot to turn the computer off.
As the other said above me, setting shorter times are generally not good for you, but a longer time might be somewhat useful.

chrcoluk · Aug 11, 2023

Either disable it or set to a high value, spinning up and down every few minutes is bad for the disk and bad for your access time.

If enabled set no lower than around 8 hours.

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Windows 'auto turn off hard disk' setting - enable or disable?

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