Computer with two hard drives on boot?

Question

First off, negative ratings if you don't read the question and give a general answer that has nothing to do with what I asked, if youre going to answer and get the points, at least know what the question is. Ill give thumbs up to you if you just answer with someone thing shows you read my question and tried to help though :)

Question: If I have a computer with multiple hard drives (say, one Solid State Drive with the OS and one HDD for the files), will both 'spin up' (I know SDDs don't spin) on boot? I want this to be a power conservative system, so I only want the SDD to power up when I boot the computer or bring it back from sleep, and I DON'T want the HDD to spin up unless the files on it are actually needed. Would the HDD spin up on boot or when coming out of sleep if the OS is on the other drive? Or will the BIOS leave the HDD alone and not make it spin up when the computer is brought out of sleep?
Again, I just want to know this because I will have a server that will go to sleep and come back and turn off and back on often (don't lecture on why the server is going to sleep, it is a special circumstance; basically the files are needed, but with long times in between accesses, so the HDD drive will power down), and I don't want the HDD to spin up just on boot and then have to spin down again until the files are ACTUALLY needed, and then have to spin back up. Preventing this would save power and ware on the drive.
Please let me know, thanks!

Answer 1

Hi,



Hmm.. I think all the current ATA drives (PATA and SATA wise) are programmed to spin-up immediately as power is applied to them. However, I know SCSI drives usually have a jumper setting to disable their auto-start until given a command. Some older IDE/PATA hard drives also did this (particularly those full-height 3.5" ones.)



But the main reason they did this was to not overload the computer's power supply with too many drives spinning up. This was certainly true for many older IDE hdds and particularly SCSI hdds that work in RAID arrays, and thus controllers may start and initialize each HDD individually. HDD motors are BLDC motors with very little starting torque, and typically draw up to 1A 12V to start. This may be less of a problem nowadays with better powersupplies for better graphics cards, etc.



Most computer's disk controllers BIOS code would force the disks up because they would initialize the disks. Even if we were able to force the BIOS not to initialize a certain controller most modern operating systems independant of the BIOS (such as Linux and Windows NTx) would initialize the disks anyway when they load the disk drivers, thus causing them to spin up.



polants's suggestion I think is the only way. I'm not to familiar with Power Management in Windows (in Linux, you set hdd power management using hdparm.) I suggest you also give a 3rd-party tool such as HDDScan a try:

http://hddguru.com/software/

for playing with HDD's power management settings.



Your hdd spinup from resuming the computer mainly depends whether the HDD is reset or not, if it is not being read. Spilt F is right about S3 sleep; S3 is an ACPI mode; it means, in Wikipedian terms:



"S3 Sleep (Standby) System appears off. The CPU has no power; RAM is in slow refresh; the power supply is in a reduced power mode. This mode is commonly referred to as 'Suspend To RAM'."



ACPI is the interface that an OS uses for power management (in general terms.) I think you're confusing this with something like S3 Virge graphics card (good old days ;-D). Anyway, I don't know how Windows handles Suspend-to-RAM but I think your best bet to stop disk spinning up is to disable the setting "S3 Hard Disk Reset" in your BIOS.



Also, to lessen HDD activity, you may want to (if not already) disable System Restore for the HDD and set the amount of Recycle Bin usage for it to 0% (by default, it spans over all disks by 10% or that was in Win 2000/XP.)



Have a good one!

Answer 2

Lol. Don't worry, I read the question.



I've never tried it though. but i'll try help.



If you want to stop the hard drive from working temporarily, then what you can do in windows xp, is go to control panel, administrative tools, computer management. Then select the disk management and right click on the button next to the device you dont want to use where it says "Online", select properties and disable it



Edit: yes, but then you can just enable it again when needed.



Edit: Oh and good idea. Do not get a 1 terabyte. they fill up a lot faster than expected. I have 2.5 TB in total. need another terabyte...

Answer 3

To load linux (and homestead windows for that remember) you'll have a boot loader. Ubuntu makes use of grub by using fact the boot loader and shops suggestions in the /boot folder. this could be stored on your ubuntucontinual and so its supplying you with this difficulty. What you're able to do is installation grub to a small boot partition on your XPcontinual, this could then make it attainable to load grub and function that to choose for between the two OS's with no need the ubuntu HD.

Answer 4

You should be able to do it if your drive supports S3.