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Is it possible to manually power down a harddrive in windows XP? Ive
got two 120gig hdds in my pc and Id like to be able to power down the
second one and bring it up only when its needed. I know you can set it
up to shutdown in power management after a time period but explorer has
the annoying habbit and polling the drives and cdroms on its own and
the damn thing powers up for no good reason.

In article < .com> in
nz.comp on 14 Nov 2004 20:07:34 -0800, elsamo <> says...
> Is it possible to manually power down a harddrive in windows XP? Ive
> got two 120gig hdds in my pc and Id like to be able to power down the
> second one and bring it up only when its needed. I know you can set it
> up to shutdown in power management after a time period but explorer has
> the annoying habbit and polling the drives and cdroms on its own and
> the damn thing powers up for no good reason.

Explorer obviously has to get some information from the HDD at certain
times, like when it needs to list all the drives, and it can only get
that when the drive is running.

elsamo wrote:
> Is it possible to manually power down a harddrive in windows XP?

if scsi or SATA then supposedly yes.

elsamo wrote:
> Is it possible to manually power down a harddrive in windows XP? Ive
> got two 120gig hdds in my pc and Id like to be able to power down the
> second one and bring it up only when its needed. I know you can set it
> up to shutdown in power management after a time period but explorer has
> the annoying habbit and polling the drives and cdroms on its own and
> the damn thing powers up for no good reason.

Not using the Windows API, apparently. The WMI (Windows Management
Instrumentation) provides a disk.setpowerstate() function, but Microsoft
says that it is not implemented yet. Looks like it is not possible. The
only way you could do it would be to set the power down delay to a very
small value.

Cheers,
Nicholas Sherlock

oh, only ATA100

ahhh Bugger. Thnx for the info.