What HDD maintenance programs do you use?

f14tomcat said:

No sleeping HDDs here either. Aside from the responsiveness issue, it's a bit like an incandescent light bulb....... Biggest strain is turning ON. Head movement (parked to active zone) is far more mechanical wear and tear than a constant 7200 rpm spin. And with Windows propensity for liking to use space on any attached drive for it's temp work, that would only increase it. I doubt the 20 minute default timeout for setting to idle/sleep does much good.

And this is true for external drives too?

Until something is being written or read the arm is just "hovering"

Kol I have everything to do with ASPM(Active State Power Management) in BIOS and Windows turned off.

Kol12 said:

And this is true for external drives too?

Well, generally, externals are not left plugged in. I can find no reference to this in Shawn's Tut:

Turn Off Hard Disk After Idle in Windows 10

But I would suspect externals would fall under the Selective Suspend in this Tut:

Turn On or Off USB Selective Suspend in Windows 10

f14tomcat said:

Well, generally, externals are not left plugged in. I can find no reference to this in Shawn's Tut:

Turn Off Hard Disk After Idle in Windows 10

But I would suspect externals would fall under the Selective Suspend in this Tut:

Turn On or Off USB Selective Suspend in Windows 10

Some externals claim to have their own power saving features but I've never been able to work out if my Seagate external has it's own or whether it's put to sleep by the Turn Off Hard Disk After Idle setting in Windows. Or maybe it's the USB selective suspend as you suggest. One thing I do know is monitoring the Seagate external SMART with HWiNFO appears to keep it awake.

Cliff S said:

Kol I have everything to do with ASPM(Active State Power Management) in BIOS and Windows turned off.

What does ASPM affect?

Kol12 said:

What does ASPM affect?

Arc has a pretty good post over on Sevenforums explaining the guts of it.

PCIe Link State Power Management - Turn On or Off in Windows - Windows 7 Help Forums

Here is a good article about ASPM LPM and so on: Maximus VI Power Saving & Power Tuning Guide - Republic of Gamers | ROG - Republic of Gamers Global

Thanks @Cliff, I will check it out.