I have a 1TB 850 EVO for my primary storage and a 2TB WD RE4 for cold storage. The WD hardly ever gets used, however for obvious reasons I never want my SSD to sleep. Is there a solution to configure only my hard drive to sleep after inactivity?
Windows – How to selectively sleep hard drives in Windows 10
hard drivewindows 10
Related Solutions
Some background:
SATA drives usually have the following options:
- Hot swap the drive (pull it from a live system, usually to replace it with a new drive after the old drive has failed).
- The ability to spin a drive down and put it permanently in a standby-mode. (Best done before hot-swapping a drive). This mode needs a reset or a power cycle to recover from. (Which is not a problem if you are going to plug in a new drive).
- The ability to set performance modes varying between 'as silent/as energy friendly as possible up to 'max performance and ignore everything else'
- The ability for the OS to ask the drive to go to a low power mode (usually spinning it down). It can recover from this. There is usually a 30-ish second penalty while the drive spins back up.
- The ability for the drive to initiate the same.
Windows solutions:
- Managed via the OS as per Alex Atkinson's post.
- Direct control via some program which asks the OS to send SATA commands. (examples: the commands listed in the question).
Drive solutions:
Change a setting on the drive and let the drive initiate power settings.
There are already several posts on that here on [su], mostly using hdparm. One way to do this would be to boot Linux (or BSD, or OSX) and run hdparm as root.
Or, as found by the OP, there is a windows port of hdparm. Note that you are directly communicating with hardware. This means that you will need to run it with elevated rights.
These settings should stay in the drive, even after you power off the system (annd thus the drive in it). Should you have an OS which does not [only] do its own power management but also tries to reconfigure the drives site (or a non-spec drive configured e.g. for something 'extremely green' then see this post.
Best Answer
This link should provide you with a detailed guide on how to do the settings. You basically need to go to Advance Power Plan Settings and manage the Hard Disk time until turning off settings and set it to the desired value. This setting shouldn't affect any SSDs on your system.
Post back if you have other questions! :)
Captain_WD.