The purpose of the primary hard drive sleeping?

[cloneman]

Am I the only one who thinks it's crazy to have hard drives sleep (particularly in laptops)?

I mean, in my experience, it's just gonna spin right back up again 5 seconds later for some random windows function or other background application.

I can appreciate the usefulness of HD sleep on a system with multiple hard drives, some of which may be infrequently used, but on a single-drive laptop?

Seems to me like you could seriously shorten the lifespan of your hard drive by having it spin down every 5 minutes and spin back up again 5 seconds later... Not to mention this would use _more_ power rather than save power.

The only way I was able to maintain my hard drive in sleep mode was to logoff my machine and sit at the login screen. Even then, the HD would only sleep for at most 2 minutes at a time.


or am I missing something?

[Vicotnik]

Crazy for me is an OS that needs to touch the HDD every now and then for no apparent reason. Why shouldn't the HDD go to sleep after a while? And spin down is something the OS handles, easy to disable if the user feels like it and it's usually disabled by default. Or are you talking about head parks?

[mkk]

It would be nice if drives had a "loiter" level of RPM's where they could do lighter operations at say half the power consumption, with a quick recovery to full speed operation. There's been talk of introducing something like that but apparently it never happened.

In the upcoming world of non-mechanical system drives it may be a moot point, but on many systems you can set the drive sleep to 1min and the system drive will still not ever fall asleep. That's messed up. Or how when the system is shutting down with all but the system drives having been asleep for hours, the system wakes up all drives before powering down. Someone did a dumb design choice if there's a software/file system necessity involved.

Individual sleep timeouts shouldn't be so hard to do, but it seems the industry doesn't care to make that a standard.

[lm]

The primary drive should be a ssd so if this is not completely irrelevant now it will be in two years or so.

[Eunos]

Where platter drives are concerned, my solution was to set a higher sleep timeout, like 10 minutes. In practise, this means rarely going to sleep.

[speedboxx]

I agree. With Windows operating systems, the OS is constantly reading/writing to the disk it seems. I dont even know why there is an option to set the hard drive to sleep after x minutes of activity, because realistically, I dont think Ive ever seen a Windows OS that could maintain 5+ minutes of no disk activity. Perhaps maybe with a fresh, clean install...but definitely not after you have a few programs loaded.

[~El~Jefe~]

During my years of windows 98se/ME, my hardrive would sleep for long time.

DOS 6.22... hm not sure if sleep worked. I think it did.

386sx love

Now I begin to think about Windows 7. I know for a FACT that ALL windows7 builds I have made use the hd a lot less during times of nothing going on. My XP builds will randomly CRANK.... wtf? I hate xp so much.

Also, with modern anti-virus programs, you might get one like AVAST which can't stop freakin examining your hd for unending annoyance. Instead of just checking once a week and also when a file is actually downloaded, it keeps checking.... but at the rate it does it would take 5 months to scan the whole drive, utterly pointless obviously retarded. The new Norton's just veg out until it has been idle a long time or you can tell it to not do that at all. My hd with norton on it doesnt move much.

8 gigs also helps a lot. However, people who insist on not spending another 80 dollars above 4 gigs have a frothing fit when I mention this.

the only reason for a HD to sleep is to screw up something terribly or to give you a nice 3-4 seconds of glue-like lag when you want to use it again. I always thought they have should like 3 speeds, one is a bare minimum for make safe writes. On densities over 1TB, you dont need much more than 2000RPM I would imagine. If you consider 4300 60gb laptop drives that suck, they are throughputting a lot less than a 1TB at like 2000 rpm. I would think normal use of 5400 would be good, and a Turbo option to crank to 7200. Of course, this makes sense and companies that make things for sale do not make sense, no sense of creativity or deviation.

[Vicotnik]

I think designing a HDD that would be operational at several different rotational speeds would be overly complicated. Such a HDD would probably cost way more than the feature would merit.

Avast is my favorite free AV btw, a custom install with only file protection installed is fairly unobtrusive.

[Cryoburner]

On my WinXP system, my secondary drive remains asleep most of the time. It's primarily used for backups, so I keep it set to spin down after 10 minutes of inactivity, and that works fine. So long as you keep things like the indexing service disabled on a secondary drive, it should only spin back up when a program accesses it. Running something like a malware scanner with background scanning enabled all the time could prevent the drive from sleeping (and reduce your system's overall performance), but those features can generally be disabled in the options. My primary drive never spins down, due to being accessed by the OS and software regularly, but I wouldn't want it to anyway. My drives are quiet enough that it doesn't make a significant difference in terms of the sound my system produces.

Back when I regularly used Windows 98, both my OS and secondary drives would regularly spin down. This was nice back then, since drives tended to be a bit more audible, but it also made momentary freezes while waiting for them to spin up fairly common.