Windows 10: Turning off Hard Drives to Reduce Noise/Power

My desktop has 1 SSD and 4 HDDs, running Windows off the SSD
I want to turn the hard drives off when I'm not using them in order to reduce noise from the PC and power consumption (it does matter to me because I often run my PC off a UPS). What are my best options for doing that?


Currently, I have set my Windows power options to turn off hard drives after a set time, but with this approach the hard drives turn off and on too many times, which I imagine would not be good for the drives. Also, with the drives off, if I put my PC to sleep, ALL hard drives must come on before the pc goes to standby, which again would cause wear.
My question is, what is the best way to go about it? And is there any way to prevent unnecessary access to the drives by Windows so that they dont randomly keep turning on?(like in Linux, the drives can be unmounted easily, preventing rogue access to them)

:)

 

Background noise through sound devices

It is possible that the noise you are hearing is coming from either a fan's motor in your computer, a mechanical hard drive that is spinning or from a ground loop somewhere that is creating a buzz or hum. - 1st, see if the noise stops when the hard drive
is idle and not spinning by closing all apps and disabling any network traffic. Use the Task Manager to see if the hard drive is doing anything under the Performance tab. - 2nd, try and run the computer in power saving mode to see if that powers down the fans
to save power. Or visit the BIOS to see if you can disable or slow the fans down. - Lastly, with a ground loop you can sometimes use a ground lift (a plug with no 3rd prong) to see if that reduces the ground hum. If you don't have a ground lift, try another
outlet or turn off any devices that may be on the same breaker. This one is the trickiest to troubleshoot. Hope this helps, please let me know if you have further questions.

 

Hard drive turns on and off constantly

Hello Vanessa,

I know the difference between the fan noise and the hard drive noise. As I stated in the post, the hard drive spins back on, i.e. it turns on, after a short period of inactivity. And yes, the fan also turns off and on when this happens, but they make different
noises. Please take my post at face value--I will not get my issue solved if you don't take it to be true. Yes, of course the hard drive is not supposed to be turned of at 0% usage--but
mine does get turned off, which is the reason I posted. If you don't have ideas on this, please forward the message to someone who understands the intricacies of the issue.

John

 

You can use a manual option like this, but make sure to turn off write caching on the drives connected to it to minimize the possibility of data loss when switching off. I would recommend this for drives that you only read from and write to only occasionally:

SISUN PW4101 3.5-Newegg.com

Turning off write caching may also help with the computer cycling the hard drives when you don't want it to. You turn off write caching by clearing the check box to enable write caching on the drive properties window from device manager for the hard drive:

 

That is actually a really solid solution to many of my annoyances, thanks for letting me know this exists. However, i live in Pakistan and shipping from Amazon etc is not possible.

I'll try and get it somehow, are there any available for the 5.25" inch bay? since my casing does not have a floppy slot

 

This is Windows, and Windows does not recognise disks or volumes that are hidden because they have no drive letter assignment. This is equivalent to unmounting them, as no access from the system is possible. However, the disk drive spindle and platters will keep running, but the heads will remain parked, unless there is a volume on a partition that remains mounted.

There ought to be a warning here that if you hide some drive volumes, you risk making your system unusable.

However, this may be accomplished with a disk management utility, or with preconfigured registry edits, saved as .reg files that may be merged into the registry to hide or unhide drives.

There is also at least one freeware utility that does the same thing:

description

Windows Drive Hider - Free Tool Hide and Protect Your Drives on Windows | Home Page - www.SecurityXploded.com


download page

Windows Drive Hider - Free Tool Hide and Protect Your Drives on Windows | Home Page - www.SecurityXploded.com

One nice thing about this utility is that it is password protected, at a rudimentary level to prevent accidental operation.

 

The problem with this approach is the fact that it does not turn off the drives, hence does not reduce noise and power consumption. Also, like i said, when i turn off/hibernate/standby the PC, the drives will all first spin back up, then spin down.