I have a USB3 external hard drive I only want to use for backup purposes. It gets power from a mains adapter. My question is whether is it sensible to use a timer plug to have it run between the hours it would be backing up and then use the timer to shut it off afterwards. Obviously there would need to be enough spare time allocated before and after to allow data to write completely, but is any damage likely to occur by removing power by timer plug every day, presuming there is no data transfer in progress?
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timer plug for usb hdd?
- Thread starter Digby
- Start date
Usually there are software settings that spin down the disks when not in use. It’s probably worth exploring that option first.
Just suddenly removing power is certainly a bad idea and may damage your file system in the long run.
Just suddenly removing power is certainly a bad idea and may damage your file system in the long run.
I doubt you risk doing physical damage (well, maybe, but it would only add up over a long time) and filesystems are pretty resilient nowadays, but why bother? I have an external USB drive connected to my Roon NUC. It’s what holds all my music files. The drive powers itself down after a certain amount of time with no data transfer, at which point it should be drawing a negligible amount of power. If yours isn’t doing that, it’d be worth looking into that first.
In Windows power settings you can set disk drive power down to turn it off when it's not being accessed. It's in minutes and zero means always on. If Windows home or the S version you can still set it with the group policy editor.
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