Power Options - "Turn OFF Hard Disks?

Ok, I am on a "Performance Boosting" jag here - though if I can't get much noticeably, then I'll stick with the old (energy efficient) plan ...

Have long wondered (and just did a "Search" here to no avail) what happens when a Time-Out period is set (vs. "Never") on the "Hard Disks" selection in Power Options.

I read something by Halo in a thread that, if I understand correctly, setting all three selections ("Monitor", "Hard Disks" & "Stand-By") to "Never", while obviously increasing power consumption, might (would?) improve performance (or at least give the PC it's best shot at achieving this). Have I got that right?

This PC is running XP Home Ed.

Thanks in advance (and my apology to Halo if I got it wrong!).
g ...

 

In a way, I suppose thats right. When the hard drives are set to shutdown, after say 30 minutes of inactivity, the drives stop spinning and go into a sort of sleep mode. When you go to access a drive thats sleeping it takes about 8-10 seconds for it to spin back up and respond to your access request. Though it might seem like this is a performance hit, its not really.

In otherwords if I have games installed to my D drive (which I do by the way) and I am playing a game from there, the drive is not inactive and will not go to sleep while I'm playing games, so there is no performance hit from having the drive set to sleep after 30min of inactivity. while I'm playing games my E or C drives might go to sleep and save some power but it will not effect the performance of my gaming. Actually, other drives going to sleep might improve the performance of my gaming, because more power is then available for the system for playing the game.

Setting the monitor to go to sleep is a different story, it will never go to sleep unless the keyboard or mouse are not accessed. So unless you walk away from the machine it will likely not put the monitor to sleep and therefore no performance effect occurs. It will both save power and the backlights of your LCD monitor and help prevent burn in on crt's though.

I always set my standby to never because I have had too many machines and or systems that refused to come out of it. And although it can save energy, I would rather turn the whole thing off and wait for the boot than risk a bad standby, since I may have to force a restart and that can cause big problems.