Can I turn off my system drive for a few seconds? And how?

Question

I want to find out what the most noisy component of my computer is, and though it could be the hard drives (since lowering the PWM of the fans and pump only helps a little). So I thought I could just turn off the drives (RAID 1) for a short time and see (hear) if there's a big difference in noise levels.

But it turns out there doesn't seem to be any possibility to turn off the system hard drive, or at least I couldn't find one after a lot of searching. Does anyone know how I could achieve this? Or how I could do something similar at least?

PS: Maybe there exists a program that can delay writes to the system drive by a few minutes (writing them to RAM or such), so that it will spin down automatically?

Answer 1

hdparm -y should put a drive in standby mode.

Now HDparm is a tool which is usually shipped with Linux, but there are ports of it for windows.

• Ways to shutdown or sleep and wake-up hard-drives oncommand
• HDParm for windows which is said to work with windows 8. I assume that it also works for Windows 10.

None of these claim to work with windows 10, though I strongly suspect that the latter one will work. I would love some feedback on that.