Detect when hard disk goes to sleep

Question

Is it possible to trace when Windows turns off a hard disk (due to the power saving threshold being met)?

I'd like to see when (if at all) the disks are being turned off.

Answer 1

There's hdparm, a command line utility for getting/setting various HD parameters for IDE/SATA drives (DMA, IRQ, powermanagement etc.).

hdparm -C <drive> whill show the power state of the drive. You could run it periodically (e.g. from a BAT) to log HD state.

The Wikipedia article linked lists download sources for Linux and Windows.