News - ASRock details its HDD Saver Technology (video)

[HEXUS]

Special connector was introduced with the company's 9-Series motherboards.

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[Liam-McShane]

I don't see the point of this. You can configure hard drives to turn off after a certain amount of minutes/hours in Windows.

[directhex]

Is he auto-tuned? Or are my speakers going screwy?

[Corky34]

Seems a bit niche use only to me.
Apart from Windows being able to power down HDD, you can also download software that un-mounts, powers down, sleeps or locks HDD, you can mod/buy a power cable with a switch, you could also use could use a HDD caddy.

[DanceswithUnix]

Best use I can think of this, if you can plug a load of LED lighting into the power saver instead of a hard drive then you can make the inside of your PC flash on and off under software control.

OK OK, but I didn't say it was a good use, just the best I could think of

I assume they had a spare power FET originally intended to PWM a fan, and this is the best they could come up with?

[edzieba]

That's... not in the least, tiniest bit secure. In any way. Bypasses include: plugging the drives into another PC, plugging the drives into different SATA connectors in the samePC, and simply turning the drives back on in the same software you turned them off with. You'd be better off just encrypting the drives, or the portions of the drive you want to secure.
As has been mentioned, you can already send an ATA command to shut down drives, so the power savings are nonexistant.

No security benefit, no power benefit, but you're paying extra for proprietary crap. No thanks.

[Xlucine]

Or you could carry a memory stick with you for your prons