Hard Drive Settings

I have become annoyed at clicking on something and waiting on my HDD to spin up and finally realized it was not the HDD going bad. (After buying a new one SHEESH)

My setting in Vista turned my HDD's off after a certain period of time.

I have sense changed those settings to keep them going all the time.

Question:

Is that damaging to the HDD?

Should I allow them to shut down after a certain period and live with the minuscule delay?

Thanks in advance....

Semper

Personally I have mine set to never go off on my desktop. I have my laptop set to shut down after 15 min of inactivity, but that's just if it's not plugged in. I'm only worried about saving power and extending battery life.

If you want it to shut down, then set the time-out to something like 30 min. so it won't go off and on when you're using the pc.

Power saving is common. If you have a recent machine with staggered spin up on it then multiple drives isn't much of a problem. I have mostly run machines "always on" but do like the energy saving features and improved drive longevity.

I have had drives simply refuse to "wake up" but not for years. My laptop has a SATA drive and it takes a good 5 seconds to wake up once the disc has spun down and I press F5.

The only harm of consequence would be drive failure but as long as one backs up with system imaging the "eventual" drive failure effects can be minimized. I like Ghost 7.5 but it doesn't work for everything. Vista has a pretty bitchin' backup built in to my version but I've not had to do a restore yet.

Cheers,

Vic

[edit on 23-1-2008 by V Kaminski]

reply to post by semperfortis


It is nothing more than an attempt to save power-for laptops.

It also will make vista more silent-as when not in use, the Hard drive spins down.

Since your hard rive has spun down, it is also producing less heat-the biggest emery of computers-especially laptops.

I hope you got a nice fast hard drive-7200 rpm with a 16 meg buffer (yes, it DOES make a difference).

PLEASE NOTE: a fast hard drive only helps when you are using hard drive, for example: booting, loading levels on games-not playing them- video and audio editing/converting.

I got a Western Digital SATA 250gb 300MB/s

7200rpms
16MB Cache

Seems to be doing pretty well....

Just a note:

I transferred everything over from the 80Gig using a program called "Drive Image XML"

Drive Image XML

It's a free program and it worked wonderfully....

I would recommend it to anyone..

Semper

reply to post by semperfortis


Good choice of hard drives.

BTW, I will be testing that software you linked to, I think that could be VERY useful in mt personal and professional life.

It worked flawlessly for me, but of course my application was anything but professional...

I'm glad I could maybe be a little help to you now...

Semper

some have argued that warm up and cool down stress on equipment is harder on it than constant running. i tend to agree with that. after all, light bulbs always burn out when you turn them on, almost never after they've been on for a while.