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There is "Offline" menu in Disk Management. If I click that, the disk becomes offline and not accessible. My question is that, does "offline" actually turn off (spin down) the disk for good (until the system reboots)? Or the physical disk is still spinning (or awake from time to time) but just inaccessible to softwares running on the system?
What about the logical disk is a RAID0? Does it also turn off the physical disks?
In case someone asks me "Why would you do that", there are disks I seldomly use, so I would like to turn it off when it is not used both for saving power and for data protection (unless the hacker got the privilege to make the disk on-line). I could use external disk enclosures but they cannot be remotely turned on/off and requires external power suppliers, plus they are not free.
From what I've heard, you can accomplish this by setting the delay appropriately in Power Management settings and then disabling indexing on the drive (and not doing anything that might access data there). (Also, if you're worried about data protection, the only real solution is to encrypt the drive.) – user55325 – 2014-05-16T04:43:52.080
That's a really clever solution. It won't make the disk unavailable to hackers but it will do the power management. – Robbie Crash – 2014-05-16T04:51:46.127