How to turn off HDD in Sony Vaio Z Optical bay

[servan$]

I am using the Sony Vaio Z. I have installed the HDD on the optical bay after removing the DVD drive from it. I didn’t use the DVD drive much and for that reason I switched it with the HDD. It is working fine now. But this additional HDD is not always necessary for me. So is there any way I can turn off HDD in the optical bay when I am not using it? It could save slight amount of power as I think.

[Aachman]

I have one way to disable the internal HDD. I don’t know whether it works 100% or not. You can go to Device manager>disks>HDD>Right click on it and select disable. It will disable the HDD but it is not sure how much safe to do this. Sometimes it may ruin your HDD or data in it.

[Donatien]

In my opinion I will never let the disk off that it always being recorded. The disc is turned off as a measure to save energy (often used in notebooks) as its main function. There are several benefits, but only thought of as a measure to save energy. I do not think that continued off and on the disk will shorten the life. Actually I prefer to leave them on all the time because it is very annoying when I want to do something I have to wait for the album and then PC reacts. It is a matter of taste, but I needed the notebook to shutdown drives.

[Mahalingam]

It is really not good. Moreover in configurations of multiple disks that separate from the main OS stock and so would not recommend this is done unless the disc can be let off that is not used in any one session. It better keep running and be ready to read file or whatever instead of having to start and immediately made to rock. I would run continuously.

If you're using GNU / Linux and can not use a disk for a long time, you can disassemble your partitions to ensure that no attempt to access it and stop it by hand with the hdparm command. I guess in some form of Windows will do it too

[Anjan1990]

I believe that this feature is depending on the motherboard you have. Start -> Control Panel -> Power Options. APM tab enable "Enable support for the Advanced Power Management" and accept. You can also using Start -> Control Panel -> System -> Hardware -> Device Manager. Turn up hidden devices on the View menu the device Search Team "Team supports Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI)" and enable it.

[Sasuke Uchiha]

I have also heard that turning off the disk reduces the life of the product. It is a complex issue to address; it depends on many factors (disc technology, algorithms off, etc.).

You will have to analyze the pros and cons and see if it worth the energy savings.

[RidD]

I have installed hdparm, I think it was a dependency of laptop-mode-tools, I forget. My hard drive is SATA and when I used following command

hdparm -b /dev/sda

To check the status of the disc but this error appears:

/dev/sda: 
HDIO_GET_BUSSTATE failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device

Then someone suggested me that I have to run hdparm as root:

hdparm -C -A -B /dev/sda 
/dev/sda: 
drive state is: active/idle 
look-ahead = 1 (on) 
APM_level = 254

Keep in mind that you have to be very careful with it since it can "kill" to your HDD...While reading the manual just in case.