Hard drive power switch

G

gtr33m

n00b
Joined
Jul 27, 2011
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5
Hi.

I have a media player with an internal hard drive, but I rarely use the hard drive and would like to add a switch to disable the hard drive power so as to reduce noise.

My initial mod put a switch on the ground, but that doesn't seem to be enough. The hard drive still powers up.

Is the hard drive grounded to the chassis, or is is it something in the sata connector, or both?

Thanks

Mark
 
What kind of media player is this?

Yes, the hard drive is likely grounded through the chassis, as well as the SATA connector. If you remove the grounds from the power lead as well as the chassis, it's likely your hard drive will try to use the ground wires in the SATA cable for all that current and potentially burn something up. Rather, I'd suggest you switch the power lines (12V and 5V both). While it requires switching two different rails, it avoids dealing with the various grounds, and there's no potential for the drive to find another current path.
 
why not use windows power saving and turn the drive off after X minutes?

why not leave it running, is it that loud?
 
The media player is an Astone AP300.

I feared that it might use the ground from the Sata connector as you suggest, which will surely kill something, which is a shame as I was hoping to use the same switch to kill the fan.

What about the 3.3v line (orange wire)? Will that need to be switched or is it unused? I suspect unused because the old pata connectors don't have them and you can use a pata to sata adapter on hard drives.
 
It's not a PC box, it's a commercial box, actually Linux based, but power settings are not changeable.

It's not that loud, but it's in the bedroom and sometimes left running (no sleep function). With hard drive and fan going you can hear it.
 
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I know it is expensive, but have you considered replacing the drive with a SSD? If it allows you to use an external drive, would you be willing to just remove the internal drive and put it in a $30 external box? Otherwise, putting a switch on both the 5v and 12v as Mohoroni recommended seems like the best solution.
 
SSD or external drive would defeat the practicality. Most of the time I play stuff over the network from a NAS box, but sometimes we take it away with us and copy stuff to the internal drive.
 
I don't know how the fan speed is controlled or switched, but if it's a 3-wire connection, it's most likely switched on the high side. Which means that if you want to switch off both the hard drive and the fan, you'll need a double-pole switch. Use one pole to switch the 12V line on the hard drive, and the other to switch the supply line to the fan.

All that being said, disconnecting power to a hard drive while the system is running is, ah, not advisable. While I've heard of such a thing being done by unmounting the drive before disconnecting it, it was a touchy operation as I recall, and involved several steps--not something you're in a position to do, it sounds like.
 
Thanks everyone for the suggestions. I ended up using a double pole switch on tht 12v (yellow) and 5v (red) wires. The fan is 12v constant so I hooked it up to the 12v on the switch. All good!

This device is designed to run without a hard drive, but I'm still careful to start it with the switch either on or off, present or not during boot.

Mark
 
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