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SSD W7 Power options?


thefreeman

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I have an F60 in my W7 PC. I was wondering what the W7 hard drive power settings need to be used. Would "Turn off hard disk after 10 minutes of inactivity" prevent garbage collection from working properly? I also have regular hard drives installed in my PC, so I want those to spin down when inactive to minimize wear on the drive...
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It should not but I would not use any power savings for SSD drives as they use very little power compared to a spinning HDD. However, I do not know that this setting is independent drives it all or none if I remember correctly.
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No in windows 7 under power settings the "turn off hard disk after _ minutes of inactivity" only applies to your primary drive. ALL other drives will spin down at some point regardless of what you change this setting to. This was a well reported complaint in windows 7 and there is currently a widget that you can use that keeps all your drives active if you're afraid of them spinning down or in the case of a SSD going to sleep.

 

To answer your question you should be fine if you set the hard disk to never shut down so that garbage collection will work on your SSD and your SSD will stay on indefinitely. Your other drives will spin down on their own after inactivity if you don't believe me just leave your computer idle and then try to access the drive, if it's a spinning drive there will be a delay and you'll hear it spinning up.

 

I quote another forum:

 

Hard drives spin-down after some time

 

Especially annoying if you have many drives and bad for the health of the hard discs.

This happen sometimes even if you modify the advanced power management policy and set the "turn the hard disc off" to "never", because apparently only the first hard drive is affected by the setting!

Unfortunately i haven't found a permanent fix for this other than install the Sushi DriveInfo gadget . Because the gadget is interrogating all the hard discs they won't spin down as long as there is activity.

 

There's probably a better method to prevent the drives from spinning down without using "Sushi" but I haven't really looked into the issue.

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I'm not sure exactly. I currently have my drives set to "Never" and so far my non-OS drives have NOT been spinning down (which was the opposite of what used to happen to me).

 

There might be an underlying issue or connection there because I think I used to have ACPI (S3 and S4 I think) disabled in BIOS, right now it is enabled.

 

I've been searching around a little and seems that nobody has been able to look deeply enough into the issue.

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In case it's not covered anywhere on this forum: If you have the Intel HM55 or PM55 chipset, you might want to try some registry tweaks to get better performance. They are mentioned in THIS thread on another forum.

 

These chipsets are very common right now, especially on laptops. My benchmarks rose considerably after applying a couple of registry tweaks which, apparently, keep the CPU from dropping it's clockspeed which impacts SSD performance a lot. This was discovered by running a CPU-intensive task while benchmarking the SSD which gave much improved SSD performance.

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