[avmjt]

This has been one the best finds for me...


I've been racking my brain about the best way to have 8 or more media hard drives but without always powering them all at once when only one is needed at a time. My home theater uses enough electricity as it is and I don't need another 100+ Watts of un-utilized power consumption.


I planned for several methods to accomplish this but in the end I found that the simplest way is to just download a wonderful little program called HDDScan to instruct your individual hard drives to power down into sleep mode after a time period of individual hard drive inactivity which you designate.


You open the program, apply the sleep timer setting for each drive, and then you're done. The setting is stored in your hard drive's internal configuration. You don't have to open the program again unless you want to change the sleep setting.


I set mine for 30 seconds. After I play a movie, poof, the hard drive powers down and the heat goes away. Press play, the hard drive spools up, and the movie plays. Only takes about 1 second longer than having it always running. Now I can have an unlimited number of hard drives without using any more power than just one hard drive on at a time. Now I also don't need any crazy cooling system with noisy fans that use even more power. It's wonderful!


The program is here...
http://hddscan.com/

 

[cameronl]

hi, this sounds really good.


I'm gonna try it now...


CaM

 

[ArtosDracon]

One thing I'd like to point out is that your drives are not going to have the same longevity as a properly cooled and constantly running drive. Hard drives are designed to be run at a constant temperature and rpm, those are the conditions under which their MTBF is determined. You won't void your warranty unless you're being blatantly careless with them, but powering down drives and varying their temperature is more likely to speed bearing and head failure in hard drives.

 

[cybrsage]

I bought the green drives from WD as my storage drives. They power down on their own.

 

[avmjt]



Quote:
Originally Posted by ArtosDracon /forum/post/16894127


One thing I'd like to point out is that your drives are not going to have the same longevity as a properly cooled and constantly running drive. Hard drives are designed to be run at a constant temperature and rpm, those are the conditions under which their MTBF is determined. You won't void your warranty unless you're being blatantly careless with them, but powering down drives and varying their temperature is more likely to speed bearing and head failure in hard drives.

Thanks. I was aware of this and decided to lengthen the sleep timer. I'm experiencing an issue where after reboot the drives do no retain the sleep times that I designate, so now I use HDDScan to generate executables in the Windows start menu to make the drives sleep only upon Windows boot. Then when I access a drive it stays on until next reboot.


For me this is a decent solution, however I would still like to have the ability to ensure even after reboot that the drives retain their sleep settings so that they sleep after not running for a long time, say like 5 or 10 minutes.

 

[avmjt]



Quote:
Originally Posted by cybrsage /forum/post/16894256


I bought the green drives from WD as my storage drives. They power down on their own.

Many drives do, HDDScan is just a utility to change the sleep timing. I would like to know of any other hard drive utilities that provide for this because as I've just posted, I'm finding that the hard drives do not retain their sleep timing settings after reboot with HDDScan, but fortunately I've found a workable solution with HDDScan by running executables in the Windows Startup that are generated by HDDScan to shut off the drives upon Windows boot.

 

[MrBobb]

If yer media drives server is running a standard OS like Windows or linux, the functionality is built-in, you shouldn't have to run a third-party, but it doesn't hurt.


Yeah, 30 seconds maybe too short, specially if you are the kind of person who jump in-and-out. Repeat start-stop add wear.

 

[stanglx]

And if you read early reports there are some concerns about the longevity of these drives.. they just came out last year so no one knows about the issues this spinning down and head locking that takes place to conserve energy will affect its life span.. let us know if it dies prematurely..

Quote:
Originally Posted by cybrsage /forum/post/16894256


I bought the green drives from WD as my storage drives. They power down on their own.

 

[MrBobb]



Quote:
Originally Posted by stanglx /forum/post/16895817


And if you read early reports there are some concerns about the longevity of these drives.. they just came out last year so no one knows about the issues this spinning down and head locking that takes place to conserve energy will affect its life span.. let us know if it dies prematurely..

Don't scare the guy man.


I have a Seagate, a Maxtor, an Hitachi. They are put to sleep from 1/2 dozen to 2 dozens times everyday (I have a utility to monitor and log this). The drives are 5-7 years old. My sleep time is 30 minutes. Still going. The only drive that have died on me is an IBM Deskstar 40 gig, but it turned out LOTS of people were having prob with this drive, so factory defect, not my fault.


Now my HTPC is powered via a UPS, I dunno if the cleaner AC has contributed to the machine/drive longevity.


I decided some time ago, am willing to trade some longevity in exchange for heat/noise/$electricity. Your goals may vary.

 

[MrBobb]



Quote:
Originally Posted by cybrsage /forum/post/16894256


I bought the green drives from WD as my storage drives. They power down on their own.

If u have a single drive and u don't want to think about it, I guess this is the way to go.


But if u have multiple drives, perhaps it's more useful to pass this function to the OS. Then u can fine tune depending on you usage, and where do u place your most often accessed stuff.


The "green drive" label sounds like a gimmick, as the ability to put drives to sleep (via OS) is been around for years.

 

[walford]

AFAIK WD does not make any drives that fully powerdown automatically.

I suspect that cybersage has Green RAID drives from WD that will use the features described in the folowing link to greatly reduce the power consumption when they are inactive:

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=610


If you note that there is nothing in the description that ever states that the drives actually fully power down. If they did then there would drive life issue caused by start up of cold totally shutdown drives. WD has been selling drives for corporate RAID systems for several years that have some of these power reduction features.

 

[avmjt]



Quote:
Originally Posted by MrBobb /forum/post/16896029


But if u have multiple drives, perhaps it's more useful to pass this function to the OS. Then u can fine tune depending on you usage, and where do u place your most often accessed stuff.

I run Windows XP, and unless I'm wrong, there doesn't seem to be any Windows function available to power down the drives individually. Under Power Management, I can power down all the drives when the entire PC is inactive, but that is not what I want. I want to power down the individual drives when they are individually inactive.


I'm really surprised there isn't better third party support for accomplishing this, or even support from the hard drive manufacturers. By the way I'm using new Seagates.

 

[stanger89]

That's been built in for a while (several versions of Windows) AFAIK. I know Windows 7 does this since I routinely get hit waiting for auxilary drives to spin up (my system drive is an SSD).


Windows may only have a global setting for all HDDs, but I'm pretty sure it applies individually.

 

[MrBobb]



Quote:
Originally Posted by avmjt /forum/post/16897748


power down the drives individually

I digress. You are right Windows have one all-or-nothing setting (at least XP). So then if u have a need to apply different settings to ea. drive, then the third party would be fine.

 

[cybrsage]

Yeah, the green drives idle at only 3.7 watts and standby at 0.8 watts.


Not too shabby. I just use the windows vista setting to go to standby.



Having a tool to choose each individually would be great. I do not need it, but I can see how others could easily benefit from it.

 

[avmjt]

I've read too many reviews and benchmark comarisons that say the WD Green takes too much of a hit in performance. The comparable Seagate Baracuda LP 2 TB is considerably faster while using 3.88 watts at idle...
http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/744/7


2 TB 7200 rpm drives will be out soon and will be faster than both of these. Also Seagate is coming out with a 2.5 TB drive this year. And a year from now these will all be obsolete, so I'm spending as little as I can for now on storage. Eventually, solid state will replace plattered hard drives, and speed and power consumption will no longer be an issue.

 

[walford]

Are you possibly confusing the response time performance of the Green WD Raid disk drives with the response time performance of Seagate PC/desktop green drives.

Very large data centers managferas want drives that will use less power and generate less heat in their large RAID5 configuriions containing Relational Data bases. The slight delay in response time is totally acceptable to then in order to save operating costs.

 

[cybrsage]

You have to look at what you want the drives to do.


The OS drive should be fast transfer, quick response, etc.


Data drives, well that depends on how often you use the data. Use it often, you want faster drives, use it infrequently, slower but less energy and heat drives are fine.


I use the green drives for movie storage. Since I am only hitting one of them maybe once a day, it is a great heat and energy saver letting them go into sleep mode.

 

[Rigby Reardon]



Quote:
Originally Posted by avmjt /forum/post/16901887


I've read too many reviews and benchmark comarisons that say the WD Green takes too much of a hit in performance. The comparable Seagate Baracuda LP 2 TB is considerably faster while using 3.88 watts at idle...
http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/744/7

Well, for media drives that are used to store video and music, the access times are pretty much irrelevant.

Quote:
2 TB 7200 rpm drives will be out soon and will be faster than both of these.

They will also be noisier and run hotter. IMO the WD Green drives are ideal for HTPC and media use. The 5400 rpm Seagates should also be good, but I have no experience with them (since last year's firmware fiasco I am still hesitant to buy Seagate drives, although that's probably irrational).

Quote:
Eventually, solid state will replace plattered hard drives, and speed and power consumption will no longer be an issue.

True, but it will take several years until multi-terabyte SSDs are available at a reasonable price. Today, the price/capacity ratio of SSDs is more than 10 times higher than that of magnetic drives. There are also still open questions regarding the reliability and durability of the cheap MLC memory that is used in consumer-class SSDs.