• Power Management in Win8.1 (Hard Disks)

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    #497963

    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

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    • #1482713

      ”inactivity” is user specific, not system specific. Your copy project was not user activity (even though it was initiated by a user), hence the hard drive powered down.

      Always create a fresh drive image before making system changes/Windows updates; you may need to start over!
      We all have our own reasons for doing the things that we do with our systems; we don't need anyone's approval, and we don't all have to do the same things.
      We were all once "Average Users".

    • #1482757

      http://www.softpedia.com/get/Others/Miscellaneous/Caffeine.shtml — get a utility called caffeine. I set mine this way [in its shortcut properties]:
      “C:Program Files (x86)wutlcaffeine.exe” -120 -useshift -keypress -startoff -ontaskbar
      Now, it resides the taskbar, when activated, it “hits” the shft key every 120 seconds. If I remember correctly, either shift key by itself [themselves? my grammer’s upstairs sleepin’!] does not send any “command to act” to the computer.
      When caffeine, you can set your power options to anything you want, and, you can temporarily override your normal power desires up to 1,2,4,8,24 hours.
      [Don’t download from softonic, there’s no telling what else is spiraling down that download-pole.]

      "Take care of thy backups and thy restores shall take care of thee." Ben Franklin, revisted

    • #1482841

      Thanks for the explanation of what is going on and a possible work-around. I have just disabled the disk sleep option. Most of the time I am active on my PC when it is running and I turn it off when I am not using it, so this feature doesn’t offer much value for me. (Most of my work is on Macs – my PC is primarily a gaming system.)

      One other interesting thing happened in my copy. I have a couple of very large files (the big one is 90GB in size). I had turned on compression on the target drive, and the big files fail to copy with an error code. When you Google the error code you find out that there is a limit to the size of files that compression can handle – one post said 30GB. So, I have just turned off compression for a folder to hold the big files and it is copying fine – and significantly faster. It’s disappointing that compression has these limits – it is the very large files that would benefit. I guess you just buy a larger backup drive. (I saw an advertisement for a 6TB WD external drive….)

      David

    • #1482851

      David, on the file storage part of your post, maybe this explanation of file size and compression will help:
      http://kb.winzip.com/kb/entry/99/
      The compression function in Windows may not be as powerful as WinZip [or maybe 7-Zip, Zipeg or other such program].

      Before you wonder "Am I doing things right," ask "Am I doing the right things?"
    • #1483004

      I was referring to the built-in NTFS “compress” option. I know that it is not as efficient as the ZIP or other specific compression tools – but it is easy to use (just check compress in the directory properties dialog) and automatic when implemented. Basically, I don’t zip files any more – too much of a hassle and too slow for large files. About the last time I tried that was zipping files to fit on a USB drive to move to my home computer. I do get zipped files (downloads, applications, etc.) but windows can unzip them easily. I just didn’t know about the size limitation for that NTFS compression.

      David

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