TR Forums

I set my Hard drives to go to sleep after 15 minutes.
Now if I move an icon from point A to point B on SSD W7 desktop there is a several second
lag before I can move the icon.
That has to be the hard drives waking up and that is crazy!

I'm now remembering trying this years before and finding that if I even put in a dvd to watch a movie
the drives will spin up and lag everything.
I could hear the old ones but can not hear the new green 6TB drives spin up.
As spin up is supposed the be the hardest wear on a drive, this may make sleeping them pointless.

Is W10 any better or just as bad as W7. I want individual control of drive sleeping.(that actually works)
That the drive will wake up only when I click on the drive itself and at no other time.

Thoughts welcome.

The point is to put the drives to sleep when you're not using the system. If you're moving icons around or inserting DVDs, you're using the system! While I agree it is kind of silly for Windows to wake up drives before it knows you need something on those drives, I don't really see this as something you need to worry about. If you seem to be frequently spinning the drives back up soon after they have spun down, that means you've got the timeout set too short; so just set it to something longer.

Are you sure some part of windows is not on the HDD? Windows has always been good about not waking my HDD drives unless it was necessary.

My best guess would be you have something linked to HDD on desktop. As Windows Explorer scans desktop to do your move request, that wakes up HDD.

The wear-and-tear of spin-up wouldn't be a problem if you installed SSDs.

And Windows 7 was so long ago that I don't remember anything about fine-tuning drive sleeping.

What blahsaysblah said - IME Win7 is good about not waking up drives it doesn't need to wake up. If nothing else, setting the spin-down time to 30-45 minutes shouldn't have much downside, though.

jmc2 wrote:

I set my Hard drives to go to sleep after 15 minutes.
Now if I move an icon from point A to point B on SSD W7 desktop there is a several second
lag before I can move the icon.
That has to be the hard drives waking up and that is crazy!

I'm now remembering trying this years before and finding that if I even put in a dvd to watch a movie
the drives will spin up and lag everything.
I could hear the old ones but can not hear the new green 6TB drives spin up.
As spin up is supposed the be the hardest wear on a drive, this may make sleeping them pointless.

Is W10 any better or just as bad as W7. I want individual control of drive sleeping.(that actually works)
That the drive will wake up only when I click on the drive itself and at no other time.

Thoughts welcome.

Did you use folder redirection to move your Desktop profile folder over to the HDD?

blahsaysblah wrote:

Are you sure some part of windows is not on the HDD? Windows has always been good about not waking my HDD drives unless it was necessary.

My best guess would be you have something linked to HDD on desktop. As Windows Explorer scans desktop to do your move request, that wakes up HDD.

Want to thank everyone for the thoughts and comments here.

If I'm not using my computer it is shut down completely.
It was just that the hard drives are not being used most of the day.
The main work is moved to the SSDs and kept there till finished

I've not done anything unusual with the hard drives, just storage drives.

Now your "linked" comment may be correct.
I keep a folder for each drive open on the desktop all the time
in case I need one of the files while editing .
Probably having the open folders causes the horrible lag on the desk
top. Can't stand that so the drives are no longer allowed to sleep.

Hmm, maybe I can go to external USB storage. I know they turn off.
But do they wake up because I opened an optical drive etc. Must test this.

Thanks.

jmc2 wrote:

Now your "linked" comment may be correct.
I keep a folder for each drive open on the desktop all the time
in case I need one of the files while editing .
Probably having the open folders causes the horrible lag on the desk
top. Can't stand that so the drives are no longer allowed to sleep.

Or, just don't keep those folders open? Switching to external storage won't change anything if that's how you manage your workflow. Every time you do something on the desktop that causes Explorer to perform a refresh, it will poll those locations and if that wakes up any sleeping HDDs, you will have a "hitch" while the disk spins up.