Hello everyone,

tinkering away with the machine here I thought of a little question, here is the situation:

I have 2 hd drives in my pc:
my c: drive (20Gb don't know manufacturer) holds my os & programs
my d: drive (80Gb Seagate Baracuda) holds just files & backups

Now: I'm in the habit of leaving my pc on for long periods, often several daysn, during which I download large of slow files. These are written on my c: and when complete manually transefered to my d:.

Now here is the question: is it usefull / a good idea / not so bright / ... to make my d: drive switch of (using windows power management) when not used for such a long period? Or is this not necessary? It's not the power usage or heat that I'm thinking about (those would be bonusses however) but it is the needles "mileage" my d: drive gets by beeing turned on all those hours without doing anything but sitting there. Or does it stop spinning all by itself when not used? (in which case: what the heck is power management for?)

I run WinXp home edition, if more info is needed just ask.

I'm of the opinion that there is no point shutting the HDD down. Spinning up and spinning down will probably cause more wear and tear than just letting it run.

As an aside, can't you just d/l straight to the D drive?

I'm not going to go into old arguements that we've played thru in these forums as well as other 's i've been in over the years or tech discussions i've been in about PC on 24/7 vs PC off-just state that in nearly 20 years of servicing SCSI>IDE drives i've never really seen an appreciatable difference in the failure rates of drives based on either of the two states-evetually the hardware wears out regardless of your preference.

I leave my server @home running 24/7-it has a 4 year old Maxtor 4.3 GB in ( with two 160 GB WD's )-still running just fine, that old 4 gig drive has been up and running nearly continously since i first installed it-but my main gamer gets shutdown all the time when i'm not using it. No harm to any of it's drives yet.

And considering the general lifespan of systems today before they get upgraded; i'd not really worry about wearing out those drives.

By the way- i still have one of my original 1st personally bought harddrives at home, a 133MB IBM that cost nearly $500 back in '91( got a company discount on purchasing it )-and it troops along with DOS 6.22 on it most admireably, aint give up the ghost yet.:)

Is it even possible to shut down just one hard drive with Windows' power management while leaving the other running?