I have 1 SSD and 4 HDD, out of that I'm mainly using my SSD and 1 HDD, the rest are just making noise. How can I spin only those 3 down, without having to reset my PC each time I want to use them (device manager method) or spinning down the 4th one (power settings method)?
You will have to find a 3rd party utility to accomplish what you want. In the old days, WFW 3.11 and earlier, one could use a utility for each hard-drive to spin down.
Yes I know I'm asking if someone knows of one because I haven't been able to find any.
I can't say I've come across anything like that. Why not take those additional drives and turn them in to external drives that can be powered on and off as needed?
There's nothing wrong with having a lot of drives, but I personally never go beyond two in a non-server. One SSD for the OS and one spinner for storage. Are the HDDs all small enough that you could replace them with one large single drive?
Yes they're 1TB each but I'd rather not replace perfectly working hard drives and give up on finding the cheapest solution which would be to turn them off when not needed it's hard to believe such basic function is not available by default.. meaning it is it's just not configurable to the way I want it to work.
Something like this:
KINGWIN HDD-PS6 Hard Drive Power Switch to Control up to 6 HDD - Newegg.com
With the software spin-down solution, all the hard drives still power on when the computer starts. With the physical switch you can leave the power turned off to them completely until you want to use them. There are cheaper/smaller switches, I just posted that one as an example.
I had 3 storage HDD's installed in my tower, but I only used them occasionally for backups so I went with a hard drive dock that installed in a 5.25" bay and removed the HDD's from the tower. When I want to do a backup, I just slide the HDD into the dock.
Quote