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I have a decent Core i7 PC, running Windows 10, and due to amounts of raw data I'm working with every other day, I have 5 SATA HDDs installed in addition to the system SSD. I also like to make my PC to run quieter and waste less energy when I'm not using those drives actively.

There are two methods to achieve that. One method, of course, is Windows built-in power settings. By using them I can set 'idle time' after which to spin-down the drives. That feature unfortunately doesn't work all that well, because it spins-up the drives from time to time randomly, or when I'm performing a search, or when antivirus software suddenly wants to check something, and so on. As a result using Windows built-in power management to power down HDDs is a pain - it's unreliable, distracting and occasionally random.

The second option that I've been personally using for about 8 years now, is small third-party utility called RevoSleep. It allows users to manually spin-down individual drives with single click from simple taskbar popup menu. While made for Windows XP originally, RevoSleep worked perfectly through all these years and Windows versions, up until I updated to Windows 10. While it still kind of works even in Windows 10, now it sometimes freezes or occasionally throws some error messages and such. In short I want something more stable, as the developer hasn't updated RevoSleep in years.

Can somebody suggest something similar to achieve the functionality of RevoSleep, both in ease of use and reliability?

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  • Do you have any price requirements?
    – Aiden Grossman
    Dec 30, 2016 at 4:11
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    Well, RevoSleep is freeware, but I wouldn't mind to spend few bucks on useful tool.
    – Artanis
    Dec 30, 2016 at 12:41
  • Great question. I, too, have found the automatic hard drive spindown functionality of Windows to be very unreliable.
    – End Anti-Semitic Hate ♦
    Oct 2, 2020 at 8:27

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UPDATE (April 2020) - I had a contact with the guy who is developing the aforementioned RevoSleep application, and he have rolled out an update to the RevoSleep, which improves the compatibility with the Windows 10, so this is still by far the best tool for spinning down unused HDDs in a Windows 10 machines.

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