Windows – How to force an internal hard drive to power on or off when I want

hard drivenoisepowerwindows 7windows xp

Obviously there are power management settings which Windows uses to determine when to power a hard drive off, and when to power it back on again. Powered down I assume doesn't mean absolute zero power, but it does mean the disk stops spinning.

I have a second hard drive which is a tad noisy. In fact, having invested in a new case, CPU cooler, power supply and fan-speed controller, it's now the noisiest component left in my computer. And I've kinda run out of money.

But… I don't need a second hard drive all the time.

So – is there a quick-and-easy way to make Windows unmount all partitions from a particular internal hard drive and power that drive down on demand, and then make it power the drive back up and re-mount the partitions when I'm going to need it?

Kinda the internal software-controlled equivalent of unplugging/reconnecting an external USB hard drive.

I dual boot, so I really need the answer for both Windows XP and Windows 7.

Best Answer

To have Windows not randomly access the drive, all you should need to do is make sure that indexing for the drive is disabled. This, combined with the power management settings, should keep the disk quiet until you manually access it.

I used this method to keep my external drive that I use for backups quiet at all times, unless it's actually backing up data.

To make sure indexing is disabled, you just go into your Indexing Options window by clicking the start menu orb and typing "Indexing Options" and hitting Enter. A window that should look like this should pop up:

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Then just find the entry corresponding to the drive you want to keep quiet and remove it from the list by clicking the Modify button and then unchecking the drive in the list that comes up.

As an added safeguard to make sure it won't index it in the future, go into My Computer and right click the drive and then choose Properties. On the bottom, you should see an option with a checkbox called "Allow files on this drive to have contents indexed in addition to file properties":

enter image description here

Uncheck that option and click OK. Your drive should stay quiet until you actually call upon it, and you won't need to unmount/remount it manually.

Windows XP should have a similar solution. Their indexing service is less sophisticated, though, and many people complain of it slowing system performance anyway, so all you should have to do in XP is just disabling the indexing service and be done with it. :)

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