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I have a rather noisy storage HDD in my SSD-based system (Win 8.1). Since I need the HDD only once a day tops, I have been looking for a way to keep it in sleep mode or otherwise shut down and wake it up when I actually need it. I tried removing the drive in device manager or setting the sleep interval in the energy settings to 1 minute, but that didn't really work. It kept on running.

I also tried 3rd party software:

  • Hotswap: rather reliable, but doesn't always recognize the drive plus there doesn't seem to be a way to wake it up after shutdown. Having to reboot just to access the drive is a no go.

  • RevoSleep: sends the drive to sleep mode and allows it to wake up, but fails when autostarted during boot time and also throws out random errors in general. Sometimes it even screws up the entire configuration thinking the drive is asleep while it's still running. This resulted in the drive being unaccessible with a reboot as the only fix.

I'd prefer a nice native solution that I can write a batch file for. I'd be surprised if MS didn't have a command line tool for that, but Google turned up nothing. I'd also settle for a reliable third party solution. Any suggestions?

RockPaperLz- Mask it or Casket
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Zerobinary99
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    Not a win8 solution, but if you are willing to boot linux once then you can use `hdparm` to tell the drive when to sleep. (This can be initiated both from the OS and from the drive and you only have to program the drive once). – Hennes May 05 '15 at 16:32
  • Thank you for your suggestion. So hdparm's actually changes the firmware settings of the drive? Neat, but I'd rather control when to start the drive myself. I have software running that will otherwise wake up the drive in regular intervals. That would be detrimental to the drive's lifespan. – Zerobinary99 May 05 '15 at 16:45
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    Aye, it changes settings on the drive. And there might be a windows tool which does the same though I do not known one. As a bit longer explanation: SATA drives can be configured to with different performance modes and different sleep modes. This allows you to configure [most] drive with something like ' tell the OS that you are going to standby' after being idle for X minutes. Note that there are commands for sleep and for standbye. One of those requires a reset. The other can get woken by the OS (with a 30s-ish delay while the drive spins up). The last is probably what happens with hotswap – Hennes May 05 '15 at 16:49
  • The last makes sense if you want to spin a drive down and pull it out of the system in order to replace it with a new drive (aka hot-swapping). – Hennes May 05 '15 at 16:50
  • Interesting! Thanks for all that info :) Yes, I'm pretty sure there must be a Windows alternative then. I remember tools that allowed to set acoustics management options and it sounds this functionality could be part of it. – Zerobinary99 May 05 '15 at 16:52
  • @Hennes: I found a Windows port of hdparm: http://koti.mbnet.fi/axh/hdparm-win32.html The site only lists compatibility for Vista, but it works like a charm in Win 8.1. :) It has to be run with an elevated prompt though. Please write your information into a proper answer, so that I can accept it as a solution :) – Zerobinary99 May 05 '15 at 17:18

2 Answers2

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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.

Non-windows solutions:

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Hennes
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  • That is one elaborate answer! Thank you, I gladly accepted it. Just for the sake of completion I want to mention that it doesn't seem to make a difference whether you activate sleep or standby reboot-wise. In both cases the drive will wake up after accessing it without requiring a reboot. – Zerobinary99 May 05 '15 at 19:00
  • Then I missed something somewhere. There is a command which it will not recover from, I issued that long ago and it was a painful mistake. Will edit-in or correct once I recall which command that was. – Hennes May 05 '15 at 19:02
  • That might very well be. The windows version of hdparm doesn't seem to have that function. The author's page also explains that the ported version has a limited feature set compared to the linux one. Luckily it supports everything I need :) – Zerobinary99 May 05 '15 at 19:05
  • The Windows port of hdparm at that link seems to no longer be available. The original site owner looks to have moved his page elsewhere and I don't see that he moved the hdparm page with it. I found a possible alternative but haven't tested it to see which features it contains: http://disablehddapm.blogspot.com/p/1.html – mmortal03 Sep 26 '21 at 20:53
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Just to make sure you got the right power setting: 'Control Panel\All Control Panel Items\Power Options\Edit Plan Settings: Change advanced power settings', check that the [Active] profile is selected in the drop down menu, expand 'Hard disk' in the list below and adjust setting as desired. I believe the default is 20 Minutes.

If the drive is still staying awake, there may be something keeping it up. Defragmentation, indexing (disable from drive properties), some odd Windows but, but that would be hard to believe... If you only need it once a day, just put it into an external drive bay. If you're using it for backups that'd be the preferred location anyway. It's easier to grab an external drive while running out of a burning building than unplugging a tower and lugging it out.

EvilKittenLord
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    Thank you for your reply. Yes, I chose the correct energy profile. In fact, all my profiles shut down the drives after 1 minute. Also, I'm sporting a Windows lite. Everything that could wake up the drive (search indexer, task scheduler, defrag etc) is deactivated and not even running. Everything else that might keep the drive awake is necessary to run. As for the hardware solution: I won't go that far for a problem that can easily be solved with software. If worse comes to worst I'll write a tool myself, but I'm sure there are better solutions out there. – Zerobinary99 May 05 '15 at 16:49