Storage Solutions how to use sata hdd specifically power related

R

rupeshforu3

Disciple
Hi I am Rupesh from India and I have a system with Intel i3 10th gen processor and Asus H510 me motherboard. I have installed windows 11 and Arch Linux and they are running fine.

I have one SSD nvme m.2 and three internal segate sata hdds. I am using Corsair cv 450 watts psu.

Most of the time I use only nvme SSD and at some time I use internal hdds for backup and restore. Here the issue is if I connect all the time sata power supply and sata data cables the life time of the internal hard discs may be reduced. In order to prevent this I can connect both power supply and sata data cables to the internal hard disc which I want to use.

Some senior hardware technician suggested that connecting and removing again and again power supply to sata internal hard disc can damage the sata power supply connector. So he suggested that connect all power supplies to all internal hard discs and just remove sata data cables and only connect them when you need.

If I connect power supply to a sata hdd and remove data cable can I think that all the internal parts of sata hdd are still running as usual when both power and data cables are connected.

I hope you have understood what I asked and not try to read this post again and still is there any doubt ask me.

Kindly suggest whether I can connect always power supplies to sata internal hard discs without connecting data cables. This should not decrease the life time of sata hdd.

Regards,
Rupesh.
 
rupeshforu3 said:
Most of the time I use only nvme SSD and at some time I use internal hdds for backup and restore. Here the issue is if I connect all the time sata power supply and sata data cables the life time of the internal hard discs may be reduced. In order to prevent this I can connect both power supply and sata data cables to the internal hard disc which I want to use.
Click to expand...
Keep them connected always. Windows internally turns off HDD after 10 minutes of inactivity. You don't have to do anything. No idea about archaic linux though.

rupeshforu3 said:
Some senior hardware technician suggested that connecting and removing again and again power supply to sata internal hard disc can damage the sata power supply connector. So he suggested that connect all power supplies to all internal hard discs and just remove sata data cables and only connect them when you need.

If I connect power supply to a sata hdd and remove data cable can I think that all the internal parts of sata hdd are still running as usual when both power and data cables are connected.
Click to expand...
In this country even paan wala calls himself senior hardware technician. Your observation is correct. Powering HDDs without data cable will keep them spinning.
 
If the hard discs are always spinning even when I don't use I think it's better to disconnect cables.

I think best solution is connect power supply and disconnect data cable.

Is there any chance of failure of power supply connector if I frequently remove and connect power supply. I just want to confirm.
 
rupeshforu3 said:
If the hard discs are always spinning even when I don't use I think it's better to disconnect cables.

I think best solution is connect power supply and disconnect data cable.

Is there any chance of failure of power supply connector if I frequently remove and connect power supply. I just want to confirm.
Click to expand...
Keep turning then on/off will make sure they fail as early as possible.
A constantly working spinning disk has very less chance of failure.

Another thing to note, modern OS these days (actually since 15+ years) idle and stop spinning the disk at around 20 mins of idle time. This is also hardcoded into the firmware as a default.

If you're on linux you can use hdparm to change it. Setting to 0 means no idle spin down.
 
Recently I have seen a number of times the following scenario in windows 11 for both sata hdd and external hard disc.

1) I have turned on my pc.
2) I have connected segate external hard disc to pc.
3) I have opened task manager and opened resources window in which I can see clearly which hard disc is being used highest including percentage. The same is for cpu and GPU and network interface.
3) I have opened Firefox browser and done something while examining task manager resources window.
4) I continuously examined task manager for 15 minutes without doing anything.
5) For first 10 minutes the usage of external hard disc was 5 to 8 percent. Exactly after 11 th minute the usage of external hard disc was 90 percentage.
6) I have tried to see which process is running and which takes higher disc resources. I have clicked the mouse and unfortunately the disc usage has been reduced to 7 percent.
7) I have disabled the services like windows search, indexing etc., and even no use.

The same happened for internal hard disc also and so from this I can say that windows performs something secretly like virus scan, optimization etc.,.

All of these can reduce the life span of hard disc being used.
 
Hi is there any utility or application in windows 11 which shows the utilisation and power consumption taken by each component like cpu, hard disc, memory etc.,.

Is there any similar app for Linux.

By using it I can check the usage and power consumption of sata internal hard disc which has power supply connected and data cable has been disconnected.
 
hwinfo works well on windows, lots of info. Seems to have logging too though i have not used it.
I use htop on linux for checking cpu/mem usage. I don't use it, but there is iotop which might work for disk usage, there is nethogs for network usage etc. You can get many more options googling for it and then see what works for you.
ex

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I think you might be overthinking about hard disk life. Disks do fail, but unless there is some issue of constantly stop and start of hard disk, there is no reason to be concerned about it.
Just have backups always, preferably offline too. I have had couple of HDD die on me (None for SSD so far), but current one is working well for many years. You can look at SMART info of disks to check health. Sometimes you might early warnings of issues ( but not always). You can use an enclosure to convert hard disk to external as nritech said, but even that can fail. I just had one fail after about 10 years - it was only used few times a year every year to back up data.
So have regular backups.
clonezilla is great for linux, although a but tedious to use. Timeshift is very fast to backup os files. For windows Macrium reflect is perfect and very fast.
Along with above can backup user data using something like rsync on linux.
 
rupeshforu3 said:
Recently I have seen a number of times the following scenario in windows 11 for both sata hdd and external hard disc.

1) I have turned on my pc.
2) I have connected segate external hard disc to pc.
3) I have opened task manager and opened resources window in which I can see clearly which hard disc is being used highest including percentage. The same is for cpu and GPU and network interface.
3) I have opened Firefox browser and done something while examining task manager resources window.
4) I continuously examined task manager for 15 minutes without doing anything.
5) For first 10 minutes the usage of external hard disc was 5 to 8 percent. Exactly after 11 th minute the usage of external hard disc was 90 percentage.
6) I have tried to see which process is running and which takes higher disc resources. I have clicked the mouse and unfortunately the disc usage has been reduced to 7 percent.
7) I have disabled the services like windows search, indexing etc., and even no use.

The same happened for internal hard disc also and so from this I can say that windows performs something secretly like virus scan, optimization etc.,.

All of these can reduce the life span of hard disc being used.
Click to expand...
Yeah, windows does defragmentation on your HDDs. It increases their life. I have one secondary HDD always plugged in. I access it like only once in a week. Windows wakes it up for me when I'm using it and then it goes back to sleep. Using it like more than half a decade. No problem.

rupeshforu3 said:
Hi is there any utility or application in windows 11 which shows the utilisation and power consumption taken by each component like cpu, hard disc, memory etc.,.

Is there any similar app for Linux.

By using it I can check the usage and power consumption of sata internal hard disc which has power supply connected and data cable has been disconnected.
Click to expand...
There are some apps that'll show you power consumption of CPU and GPU. These 2 things usually account for 80-90% of the total power consumption. Power consumption for other components isn't accounted because it doesn't matter much. Some components like HDD have roughly fixed power consumption of a few watts. You can check manufacturer's website for the correct figure.
 
I think you are overthinking it mate.

1. 2.5" inch SSD/HDD usually consumes 3-6W and 3.5" HDDs consume 9-12W, so power consumption shouldn't be much of an issue.
2. HDDs are designed to spin down if they are not being used. Even if you have built your own OS with no HDD spin down, the controller will bring an idle HDD down. Linux (no matter which one) is no different and HDD will spin down when not in use.
3. Keeping the HDDs plugged in will also periodically defragment your drive (if disk optimization is configured in windows or a scheduled job in Linux) so that's another good reason to keep your disk connected.
4. No if you are not using your drive you won't adversely affect your drive's health in a negative way (if left connected)
5. Mathematically the chance of damaging your HDD while you manually fiddle around with SATA connector (over a period of time) is categorically more than the chance of any adverse effect on the HDD if you leave it connected.
 
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