I have had my control panel advanced power management scheme set to turn off hard disks after 60 minutes of inactivity. I think “inactivity” means no user keystrokes or mouse actions. I have been copying one large drive over to a new drive (about 1.4TB of data). I found that with this process running – the time estimate was more than 24 hours – after 60 minutes the copy process was paused and the disks shut down. I had naively assumed that the system would not shut down when an active file process was running, but I guess that’s not the case. (I changed the power setting to “never” turn off disks and the process is running now.)
I think this means that you can’t let the disks turn off if you are just letting a big process execute – I assume that would include big and complicated statistical processes too. If I have an analysis running that takes more than one hour to complete, would the system pause that process too if the power scheme was set to turn off drives after 60 minutes and I was away from the PC? I guess I expected the OS to be a bit smarter about this.
David