SATA Power Switch - On/Off

[spoon_]

I'm basically interested in a switch that will either feed my HDDs with power or not.

Got a nice backplane here that I want to power up when needed.

Has anyone dome something similar or seen any good info on the internet?

I found this:

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/...2341667,00.asp

which is not quite what I'm after, close though.

[jackvdbuk]

how much power do drives use when "powered down" must be pretty low?


what the reason spoon?

[spoon_]

Nah its not about being green lol

Drives need to be off as they're my backup drives and no need for them to run all the time.

Hope its less vague what I'm trying to achieve now...

[arthurleung]

Wouldn't diskpart offline them and let windows power management spin down the drives a neater solution? Since the drive is offline windows can't wake it up. Then you just do diskpart online to bring them to life. Put the command in the backup script and you're sorted.

[Queelis]

Ok, this is something I'd really be interested in as well. I thought the only solution for me would be to buy an external HDD and not turn it on, simply.

But another question, would the HD spin up every time I booted the PC?

Oh, arthurleung, maybe you could explain your solution in more detail? I don't know anything on the software/programming side of computers, so no idea what you wrote there

[this_is_gav]

While a bit more expensive than a switch, an all-round better choice would be one of these.

So long as you've got your SATA drives set up in AHCI mode rather than IDE emulation mode, it's hotswappable.

[Sputnik]

A power lead with a switch it in like you showed is easy to make and to make it so the drives are either on or off is simple too but, Aren't some BIOSes a bit unhappy about drives being connected and not powered up ?

As Already said, There is alot of them racks where you can just put a bare drive into and remove them easily.