Turning off 2nd HDD

[jordanabc2332]

I have 2 hard drives. My primary HDD is super quiet, while my second one is relatively loud. I dont use the second hardrive that much and the noise is killing me.

Is there a way to turn off the second hard drive when im not using it? (Either manually or by software)

Please help.

[DoctorReno]

Some power management settings allow you to turn a HD off after a set period of inactivity but I do not know if you can specify individual drives. I will be interested to see what other members have to say on this topic.

Hey... just found this article...check it out:
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/f...er/021734.html

[Gettinbye]

I have the same thing with one of my "backup" boxes-quiet O/S drive with a loud storage drive. Running winXP and power management set to turn off hard drives after 5 minutes. This shuts off my backup drive about 5 minutes after boot until I need it. When I open a file from it, it takes a couple seconds to spin up, but it's worth not having to constantly listen to it.

[Chuckiechan]

I've shut mine down in the device manager. (win 2K). Seems to work ok.

[jordanabc2332]

Thx for the replies...i ended up changing the power scheme as you guys mentioned. It turns off after 3 minutes of inactivity. Thankyou every1.

[soulja]

i'd just uplug it

[Redwolf]

You can probably rig up a DPDT toggle switch to turn the drives on and off by stopping both common leads (the black wires) before they get to the drive. But that might damage the machine.

If you are using SCSI, you can *probably* do that safely. If it's an IDE or ATAPI hard drive, then I wouldn't even try it.

What you can try is to do into Windows Power managment, and tell the machine to shut off the HDD after 30 minutes or so. You can do that through BIOS too, though I'm not sure which is better.

[Bovon]

I had a machine awhile back that I had two master drives. I had both jumpered as master and on the same IDE channel. I wired in a DPDT switch with a center off. The switch contacts broke the red and yellow wires and left the blacks intact. When the switch was in the center off position, neither hard drive would be powered, and there would be no boot. (I did it like that so that I could connect a third drive in the system to fdisk, format or whatever..without seeing the other two.) With the switch in the up position, I ran one hard drive with its OS and if I wanted the other drive, I had to shut down, flip the switch to the down position and reboot. Worked like a champ..these were IDE drives also.

From this arrangement, I would think a slave drive could easily be set up with a switch to open or close the red and yellow wires going to the molex socket for the slave drive. Be aware however, the machine will need to be shut down, the switch set to power the drive and then the system rebooted before the system will know the drive is attached..it does not work like USB.