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In Windows, do hard drive spin-down times have to be set individually, per drive?

I set the drive spin down time to 180 minutes through Power Options, as I'm tired of having to wait for drives to spin up when I need them (I had it set at 20 minutes).

However, after applying the new 180 minute option and many reboots later, I still have to wait for drives when accessing them through Explorer. It's like the new spin-down time setting didn't apply.

Is this a per-drive setting? Does it only work with the main OS drive (C:)?

My main OS drive (C:) is an Intel SSD. Then I have four mechanical storage drives. I've wondered if perhaps there's some other function that's getting in the way of accessing the drives "cold", giving the appearance of spun-down drives, like Windows initiating some type of network scan for network drives before listing local directories...?

Coldblackice
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    Both the OS (in your case windows-7) and the drives can initiate a sleep mode where the drive spins down.

    Adjusting the "power options" in windows probably only configured the OS part. You still need to set that on the drives.

    (As to how to do that from windows: No idea. For BSD/Linux/OSX I would use hdparms).

     – Hennes Jun 01 '13 at 00:02
  • Additionally the drive manufacturer might provide a low level utility to do this, as is the case for certain WD "Green" drives. – Karan Jun 01 '13 at 05:30

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