Hard Drive question

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Executioner
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Hard Drive question

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I'm finally building a new desktop rig to replace my 8 year old rig. It's going to have a 420GB boot SSD and a 1TB SSD game drive. I would like to add a spinner drive to store files etc., but I don't want it powered on all the time, and I don't want to reboot to power it up. Is this even possible? If so, what would I need to make this possible for an internal drive?
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FlyingPenguin
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Re: Hard Drive question

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By default a spinning hard drive will spin down after a certain amount of time. Default is 20 minutes I think. You can change it in the Control Panel -> Power Options -> Change Advanced Power Options -> Hard Disk -> Turn off Hard Disk after...
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Losbot
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Re: Hard Drive question

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1TB game drive? You must be playing lots of small games or a couple of big ones. :)
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Re: Hard Drive question

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Losbot wrote:1TB game drive? You must be playing lots of small games or a couple of big ones. :)
Mine is also 1TB. Almost all my games are through Steam so I let them store them :) I only keep what I'm actively playing. If I want to play an older game, I just re-install it.
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Re: Hard Drive question

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Problem is some of those games save progress locally. You lose that progress. That's happened to me in the past with some of the older Assassin's Creed ones.
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Executioner
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Re: Hard Drive question

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Yeah a 1 TB SSD is fine for me. I will usually uninstall a Steam game or several of them if I haven't played them for a while. Not a big deal. I also have on my game drive TONS of music files which I plan to move to the spare drive to make more room. This also includes my boot drive backups which will also get moved.

So can I specify a HD where the OS turns it off or does it apply to all hard drives? I usually have the setting in power for performance and not balanced.
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Re: Hard Drive question

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After some searching, Amazon has this hardware: https://www.amazon.com/Device-Switch-Ch ... B01MAX56SA

This is what I was originally thinking about - a hardware solution. Anyone ever try to use a hardware solution for turning off hard drives?
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Losbot
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Re: Hard Drive question

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Why add more complexity to the system. I would just use the power saving features of the HDD. I feel that if you use that method, you'll be seeing a lot of messages regarding a missing drive when it tries to access things on that HDD. You might drive yourself nuts with that. lol
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Re: Hard Drive question

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Just install it and forget it. Windows will spin it down after a few minutes when not in use.
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Re: Hard Drive question

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okeedokee. I'll just let windows manage it then.

I'm just curious - do you guys have your power setting as balanced or performance? On my laptop which I have a few games, I have to have it on performance; otherwise, the game plays like crap with the laptop throttling the fans and other hardware.
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Re: Hard Drive question

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It has more to do with laptops and battery management. Like how long before the screen sleep, and the PC sleeps. And you can always override these things.

All my PCs are on balanced. It's not like it's going to throttle your CPU down when you're playing a game. I then manually set things like screen sleep time, PC sleep time (I usually disable on towers), hibernation (which I never use on towers), etc.

Balanced is a good default for most people.
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Re: Hard Drive question

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When I play games on my gaming laptop, I switch to Performance, which I edited so the CPU is at a minimum of 100. When I'm done, I switch to balanced. That's just me.
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