Turn Off Hard Disk After Idle in Windows 10  

tenmen said:

Hi to all,
I have a Lenovo Y-700-15ISK laptop which is equipped with a 1 TB 5400 rpm WD Blue HDD and a Samsung 128 GB SSD.
I am facing some stuttering issues while playing games,which are installed on the HDD,probably because the HDD is energy efficient,it spins down if no data from it is accessed ,and it randomly turns off while I play games!

I have tried the hdparm program,but it didn't help me to fix the stuttering issues at all!
So I set the ''turn hard disk after. .'' option to never!
And the sttutering issues while gaming have gone!
But I noticed that after disabling of that feature,the HDD warms up for a short period of time,but I am not so sure about that!

Please tell me if there is a possibility of overheating of the HDD,and any way of harming it,with the ''turn disk off after..'' option set to never?

Thanks to all in advance!

Hello @tenmen, and welcome to Ten Forums. :)

Usually if you keep the vents and fans on your laptop clean and unblocked, the bit of heat from your HDD shouldn't cause overheating.

If you like, you could toggle this back on when done gaming to help with cooling and battery life.

Another option is to have two power plans set how you want while gaming and when not gaming, and use the added context menu below to make it easy to switch between using the power plans.

'Choose Power Plan' context menu - Add in Windows 10 - Windows 10 Customization Tutorials

You're most welcome. :)

Hello drpetracca, and welcome to Ten Forums. :)

I'm afraid that we currently cannot set to have specific hard drives to be turned off when idle. This will affect all HDDs connected to the PC, but SSDs will not be affected.

tenmen said:

I disabled the ''turn off disk after..'' and set it to never,what bad could happen to the HDD now?
Please tell me!

Hello tenmen, :)

Nothing bad will happen to the HDD by setting this to "Never". It will only cause the PC to use a bit more electricity since the HDD will always be running while the PC is turned on instead of the HDD spinning down (turn off) while idle to save power.

If the HDD is in a crowded case, it may operate a bit warmer since it's always running. This is nothing to worry about though unless you have issues with air circulation.

If you don't leave your PC running idle all the time, then there's really no need to have your HDDs turn off while idle unless you just wanted to.

You're most welcome. :)