The SSDs (solid state drives) have become popular in the recent times because they are faster and consume less power. But HDDs are still favored by some computer owners for their longer life. An HDD can keep working for more than 7-8 years (it will continue to work after that, but it becomes unreliable), while an SSD lasts only for 4-5 years at the most. But the life your storage media also depends on how you use them. For example, if you let the HDD go into the sleep mode very often in order to save the power, then it will spin up and spin down more frequently and reduces the life of the HDD. If you want to prolong the life of your HDD, then you can disable the sleep mode for your HDD using the free No Disk Sleep utility for Windows.
Although you can disable the sleep mode for your HDD through the Windows control panel, the free No Disk Sleep utility gives you many more options – like selectively disable the sleep mode, quickly toggle the sleep mode etc.
The No Disk Sleep utility is available as a setup installer which installs this application in Windows easily. When launched, it places an icon in the notification area of the taskbar. You can right-click on this icon and select Show options window from the right-click menu to open the No Disk Sleep options window.
In the No Disk Sleep options window, you can choose to automatically disable the sleep mode for all the hard drives or choose which of the drives you want to prevent from going into the sleep mode. You can also choose the time interval after which it should wake up the hard disk so that it does not go into the sleep mode. You can choose the time interval anywhere from 2 minutes to 15 minutes.
Conclusion: Disabling the sleep mode for hard disk drives helps you cut down on the extraneous spinning up and spinning down of the hard disk header and increase the hard disk lifetime. The free No Disk Sleep utility can take care of preventing hard disks from getting into the sleep mode and extends their life.
You can download No Disk Sleep utility from http://www.myportablesoftware.com/.