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I am using a 3.5" SATA HDD from the eSATA port of my laptop. The HDD is powered with another ATX power supply. Each time I unplug the eSATA, I cannot make the HDD spindown before I power off the ATX.

So, any tool to do this ?

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4 Answers

up vote 3 down vote accepted

Have you tried savely removing it (perhaps only for USB) or unmounting the drive?

Else have a look at HotSwap!

You can treat the eSata like a HDD you're trying to hot swap, thus turning it off. But instead of swapping it, you just leave it off.

Features:

  • Compatible user interface with the "Safely Remove Hardware" icon on Windows XP.
  • Confirms all volumes assigned to the drive are not in use before removing it.
  • Spin-down the drive to remove the drive safely.
  • Not only fixed disk drives but also other type of drives can be removed.
  • Runs without user interface by given command line switch and also the message popup can be suppressed.

alt text

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I do try to unmount(using the icon of removeable devides) the device before unplug, but I cannot be sure whether microsoft will spindown the HDD. I'd like a tiny tool to help me to make sure it do spindown. – Galaxy Sep 24 '09 at 7:09
:-) "savely removing" is a great phrase! – nik Sep 24 '09 at 8:58
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up vote 1 down vote

I just find hdpram have win edition. The check function works under Win7 x64, set function not tested as my extHDD is at home.

HotSwap! is good and the UI is good too.

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I made a test. Both works. HotSwap maybe a mixture of flush, unmount, hdparm -y and remove the device. Without unmount, even hdparm -Y can be wake up by explorer.exe. – Galaxy Sep 25 '09 at 7:15
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up vote 0 down vote

hdparm will not work with all SATA controllers, (for example, I have Promise FastTrak TX2300 and hdparm issues an error message).

I think there are other utilities that may work, for example sdparm and sg3_utils, both have a Windows port. I will try them.

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up vote 0 down vote

Hard Disk Sentinel at www.HDSentinel.com is a good tool that lets you adjust your Advanced Power Management of each individual hard drive. It allows a range of settings that effect the spindown (or not). It also lets you adjust the AAM (Advanced Acoustic Management) - how loud the hard drive sounds vs the tradeoff of increased seek performance.

The free version has a nag screen but lets you adjust all these indefinitely.

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