Does your hard drive ever spin down?

[taob]

Maybe this is dumb question, but why even bother with the power-saving option to spin down your hard drive when it isn't in use? On both my XP and Vista systems, the hard drive never goes idle for more than maybe 10 or 15 seconds, at most. I'd probably have to shut down all my apps, disable AVG, BOINC, Google Desktop, Windows Search, Windows firewall logging, etc., etc. to avoid any disk I/O. At that point, I might as well just put the whole laptop to sleep.

Maybe once we start putting the OS on SSD's and using hard drives for data, this would make more sense.

Anyone out there actually benefitting from spinning down their hard drive when it is idle?

[sugo]

Yes, on both my X60s and T42, HDD spins down most of the time during web surfing or idle.

I set HDD to spin down after 30 seconds on battery for X60s. It helps extending battery life here.

I am using Windows XP on both thinkpads.

[taob]

Yes, on both my X60s and T42, HDD spins down most of the time during web surfing or idle.

This is what I don't get... even if you are just web surfing, your browser needs to update its cache, cookie list, etc. Do you have that all turned off?

I set HDD to spin down after 30 seconds on battery for X60s. It helps extending battery life here.

I see that the standard "Maximum battery life" profile will spin down hard drives after 30 seconds of idle time. But when I create a new custom profile, the lowest I can go is 1 minute. Anyone know how I can specify a value shorter than 1 minute?

[dr_st]

This is what I don't get... even if you are just web surfing, your browser needs to update its cache, cookie list, etc. Do you have that all turned off?

Depends how much time you spend on a page. If you're reading a long article or browse through a long page of responses on a forum, the hard drive is idle during all this time (unless background apps do something with it).