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I've recently found out that HDDs consume ~6 times less power when not spinning, and so I thought it would be interesting to see by how much my battery life would increase if I minimized hard drive usage and only use Teamviewer to do stuff on another computer.

The situation is:

  • Notebook with Windows 7;
  • Only one HDD with OS installed on it;
  • No apps that should actively write or read anything from disk running;
  • Teamviewer is connected to another computer;
  • Teamviewer logging is disabled;
  • Windows search indexing disabled;
  • In advanced power settings, hard drive automatically stops after 1 minute;

And yet, hard drive spins up again after 20-30 seconds of idling.

Using Process Monitor, I've filtered non-file operations, and there is a lot going on all the time from Explorer and Svchost. Hard drive stops after roughly a minute of inactivity, and then spins up again, but I couldn't see any difference between when it's spinning or idling.

From listening to computers for as long as I've been around them at home, in school, at work and elsewhere, I think it's safe to say there's always some disk activity, even on fresh Windows installations, not connected to internet. So I'm not sure Windows is designed to be able to abstain from using its system drive when nothing is going on.

Then there's an issue of the hard drive starting and stopping too often. I've read before that this may cause the HDD head parking mechanism to wear and cause malfunctions in the long term.

My questions here are:

  • Is it possible to configure Windows in a way that would maximize disk idle time, without the drive spinning up to do some trivial work every few minutes?
  • What is Process Monitor showing Explorer and Svchost do all the time and why can is still be going on even when the drive is not spinning?
  • Is it worth the trouble?
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user1306322
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  • What you want is not realistic, even if you prevent write/read access to the entire drive the hdd will spin up attempting to make the read/write – Ramhound Jun 24 '16 at 23:02
  • Did you consider migrating your system drive (C:) to SSD drive? Most of activities operate on that drive. Keeping your current hard drive as secondary drive may minimize chance of spinning it up (anti-virus checks etc., but they can be kept under control far easier). – miroxlav Jun 24 '16 at 23:18
  • You can boot an os from usb. Slight risk of usb wearing out and your data then being at risk. Less risk with SSD as larger capacity and to do with type of flash memory.SSDs would use. – barlop Jun 24 '16 at 23:22
  • also i've heard something about windows embedded having a way to redirect hdd writes to another drive eg to a usb or something. – barlop Jun 24 '16 at 23:28
  • Good luck getting any actual software to run on Windows Embedded, outside of software, specifically designed for it. – Ramhound Jun 24 '16 at 23:35
  • it actually was possible to do this with the XP system, even with XP it took weeks of research to discover how to turn off all tracking, tracing, logging, scheduling, beyond also reducing the services to the minimum for operation. When it comes to windows 7 and your talking about the OS disk not a data disk, even if the information was available, stopping all of it might be called near impossible. That would also disclude using the system :-) only when the user is idle and the win7 system never is. – Psycogeek Jun 25 '16 at 04:47

1 Answers1

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…HDDs consume ~6 times less power when not spinning…

That’s one of those “truthy” facts. Even if your ideas could even be implemented on a practical level, how much power would be used to get the non-spinning hard drive up and spinning again?

This is along the same lines as people who put systems to sleep at night versus people who power down machines at night. At the end of the day one method is not significantly more “efficient” or better than another and is really all theoretical in nature.

And—specifically—in the case of hard disk drives the solution to the issue you describe is simple: Swap out the hard drives in your systems to use an SSD (Solid State Drive) instead. No moving parts, far more efficient and such. Of course a decent quality SSD with the same capacity as an hard disk drive will cost signifcantly more money, but if power consumption is a concern then hey… Money is no object.

Giacomo1968
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