I use my PC mostly for studying. I take frequent breaks during these study sessions and put my PC to sleep to limit dust entering its case and also to save power. I have an SSD (where Windows resides) and a HDD where I only store my games. I would like to put this HDD in perpetual sleep and prevent it from waking up whenever I wake my PC as I understand a high start-stop cycle could be detrimental to its health. Is there any way to do this?
I am on Windows 10.
Actually, a very long period of inactivity for a hard-disk drive (HDD) is more detrimental than occasionally spinning up and then down, because inactivity can allow parts to stick. If the HDD spins down afterwards, when not accessed, there should be no need to be concerned.
For an external HDD, a simple fix is to switch it off if not needed, to unplug the USB cable, or unplug the power supply. The last has the advantage of reducing risk to the drive if there are power surges.
External HDD's that are ten years old, and more, are running on some systems I maintain, with nary a failure! Most are left plugged in, and spin up and spool down perhaps a dozen times a day.
Note that solid-state drives (SSD's) have limited data retention when powered down. The capacitors in the NAND memory eventually lose the stored charge. Disk Manufacturer states at room temperature, data might last two years, but in a warm server rack (40°C), "data retention shortens to 13 weeks."
HDD's also lose magnetization over time, but at the rate of ~1%/year. In normal use, disk optimization running in the background would rewrite data, effectively refreshing it, but unused, a disk might lose half it's magnetization in ~70 years. Stored for 10 years, the bytes would still have >90% of initial strength, likely still fully readable.
