I've got a couple of 7200 rpm maxtor drives in my computer. One or both of them make a bit of noise and I'd like to find out which without opening the case (it's a hassle to get out of my desk). I'm looking for a utility that I can use to make an individual hard drive spin down. In Linux I'd just type in hdparm -y /dev/hdb for example and that would put my slave drive on the primary IDE channel to sleep. Is there some utility I could download somewhere or command line equivalent to hdparm for Windows 2000/XP? I've tried looking around the net but the only pages I've found so far have been for specific laptops.

Thanks,
Jim

Just wanted to let everyone know I found what I was looking for. Here is a link for anyone interested. http://www.infoclub.com.np/download/utdisk.htm Hard disk sleeper is the one that puts a drive into sleep mode. It works on XP too

The file that is downloaded is a self extracting .exe called hdsleep.exe. Contained within is a file also called hdsleep.exe so you'll want to rename the file that is downloaded otherwise you'll either overwrite the original, or you won't extract the file you want.

Jim

hmmm... timebomb on the software. It only works once, and the authors website is gone ...off I go looking again.

Jim

This might not be what your looking for, but have you considered just using a Knoppix CD so you can access Linux and "hdparm"?

Hey, I didn't think of that! I have a Knoppix disk on hand too I used that program that I described earlier (it worked once) and was able to find out was I was after... both drives are noisy :x

In the meantime though, I am still looking for something to use in Windows. I don't use my d: drive very often (only for backups) and so it would be nice to turn it off while still being able to use my computer. Heh... at this point even just finding a serial number for this software (hdsleep) would suit me... it certainly appears to be abandonware. I can't find any trace of the author anywhere.

On a side note it's interesting to see a case of the software I want being readily available for Linux but next to impossible to find for Windows. Usually it's the other way around... 8)

Jim