Windows 7 hard drive auto-shutdown

[wikus]

I have noticed since using Windows 7 that it automatically shuts down my hard after 20 mins. I know I can change this behaviour in the control panel.

Does anyone have a clue whether a constant startup and shutdown of the hard drives will damage the hard drives in any way or decrease it's life span significantly?

 

[Digilus]

I have noticed since using Windows 7 that it automatically shuts down my hard after 20 mins. I know I can change this behaviour in the control panel.

Does anyone have a clue whether a constant startup and shutdown of the hard drives will damage the hard drives in any way or decrease it's life span significantly?

Try looking under Power Options - (just type that in the search/run section)

The spinning up and down I don't think hurts the drives as they are being fed power and are probably not entirely dead (I might obviously be wrong) - but power options is where you need to look.

 

[psichron]

Your harddrive has several attributes that limits its lifetime. The mains ones are power on hours, device power cycle count and load cycle count. (see http://www.ariolic.com/activesmart/smart-attributes/load-unload-cycle-count.html)

Power management affects these three attributes directly. Spinning down the disk lowers power on hours count (good) but increases device power cycle count (bad).

Load cycle is something you can't set directly in power management options I think, but you can influence it with the windows version of hdparm or a similar tool. As I understand it, load cycle is where the platters keep spinning but the read/write head moves to a safe location away from the platters. This is useful in a laptop because while the read/write head is not above the platters, bumps to the harddrive will cause far less damage.

The best thing you can do is download something that reads the SMART data off the disk (e.g. Speedfan) and that will tell you the current and estimated expected power on/power cycle/load cycle counts. From this you can decide whether you'd rather have the disk being on all the time or rather save power cycles.