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Questions about GIGABYTE products => Motherboards with Intel processors => Topic started by: techie101 on March 22, 2016, 09:40:24 am

Title: Z170x Gaming 7 - Control of SATA ports
Post by: techie101 on March 22, 2016, 09:40:24 am

I have 16 hard drives in my machines whirring away and i'd like control over when they are switched on without having to go into the case to pull out cables. eg. disable some temporarily so they are only operating (whirring and draining power) when i need them in the evening. Does anyone know how to best achieve this?

I have an m.2 drive, 8 3.5" drives on the internal sata ports and 8 3.5" drives on a 10 port sata controller card (via AHCI) all on Win 10.

In the bios the controller card appears but there are no options to change any settings on it. There is also the ability to disable 6 of the 8 on board sata ports (ie. the intel ones), but this is not ideal as it doesn't cover all 8 ports and i'd need to reboot each time.

Thinking just now i see that the drives appear under the "Safely Remove Hardware" icon in the bottom right of Windows, so maybe i can just remove them from there (or by script) and then rediscover hardware when i need them.

Anyway, thought i'd post here in case there is any Gigabyte thing that can help that i don't know about (or any other suggestions).

thanks

Title: Re: Z170x Gaming 7 - Control of SATA ports
Post by: joevt on April 23, 2016, 08:31:55 am

Don't they sleep automatically after being idle?
http://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/21454-hard-disk-turn-off-after-idle-windows-10-a.html

Does going into Disk Management, and changing disks to Offline make them go to sleep? Then you can make them Online when you need them again. I googled "script to make drive offline windows" and found this:
https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/heyscriptingguy/2012/11/25/weekend-scripter-the-easy-way-to-manage-disk-drives/

Title: Re: Z170x Gaming 7 - Control of SATA ports
Post by: shadowsports on April 23, 2016, 02:52:32 pm

techie101,
While the controller card provides the "interface" for 8 additional disks, you probably won't get the granularity of control via power management you are hoping for with this set up.  Sure you can jump through hoops and run scripts that might allow you to bring the drives on/offline as joevt suggests.  I don't recommend this as a reliable solution however.

If you need that much storage, I strongly suggest you invest in a NAS or some type of dedicated storage array.   ;)