Installing Windows 7 on 2nd harddrive question.

[Dogwan]

Hi,

I just registered and this is my 1st post.

I have searched and can't find the answer to this question.

If I install a 2nd harddrive in my optical bay (2009 15" MBP) and load windows on it with Bootcamp, will it spin up the harddrive while I am booted in OSX?

I am mainly concerned about battery life and don't want it spun up all the time.

Here's the background:
I am a full time college student with funding issues. My optical drive failed about 2 yrs ago. Never done anything about it because I can use my old Powerbook as a Firewire drive if I absolutely need to read a disc.

About mid-way through last term my HDD failed. Bought a 500gb, 7200 rpm drive and got back up and running without losing any data.

Now I am not happy with my battery life. Not horrible, but I cut it close by the time I get done with classes each day. Before changing drives it was rarely a problem. And, I don't notice any appreciable uptick in speed with the new drive.

Also, more and more I am running into the need to run Windows. CUrrently if I need a Windows program I have to hoof it down to campus and use the comp. lab. Luckily, my school has an MSDN developer program and I get free software from it.

SO, I am now thinking of moving the 7200 rpm drive to the optical bay for Bootcamp and getting a 5400 rpm drive to run day to day stuff in OSX.

 

[w00t951]

This is exactly what I've done in my Mac.

The HDDs will spin down on their own, but you can open a Finder window and manually unmount them. This will prevent them from spinning up until an application polls the drives (like Disk Utility or System Information).

If they do spin up, you can just wait for them to spin back down again. By default, I think it's 5 minutes of idle (no HDD activity) time.

You can edit the idle time to as little as 1 minute, or prevent OS X from mounting the drives at boot at all.

 

[andy9l]

You can edit the idle time to as little as 1 minute, or prevent OS X from mounting the drives at boot at all.

How?!

My Windows install is on the original HDD inside my iMac - OS X, and everything else, is on another internal SSD I popped in myself. I'd love to be able to prevent the HDD spinning up!

 

[w00t951]

How?!

My Windows install is on the original HDD inside my iMac - OS X, and everything else, is on another internal SSD I popped in myself. I'd love to be able to prevent the HDD spinning up!

This may be dangerous to the data stored on your Windows partition. I don't reboot often enough to find it worth the risk to prevent mounting a drive at boot, so I just manually unmount them.

 

[andy9l]

This may be dangerous to the data stored on your Windows partition. I don't reboot often enough to find it worth the risk to prevent mounting a drive at boot, so I just manually unmount them.

Ah, yeah I found that a while ago - it'll still boot the drive up when turning the Mac on or waking from sleep, unfortunately! I'll stick to manual ejects

Thanks though!

 

[w00t951]

Ah, yeah I found that a while ago - it'll still boot the drive up when turning the Mac on or waking from sleep, unfortunately! I'll stick to manual ejects

Thanks though!

Yeah, sorry about that. I saw that article and thought it might come in handy for someone down the line. Apparently not.