The Turn off hard disk after setting in Power Options lets you specify the period of inactivity before the disk is automatically powered down.
Having your HDDs automatically turn off after being idle can help save energy and extend the battery life.
When you or anything tries to access a HDD that has been turned off, there will be a delay of a few seconds as the HDD automatically turns back on and spins up before being able to access it.
This tutorial will show you how to change how long HDDs are inactive before automatically turned off in Windows 10 and Windows 11.
You can easily check to see if the disk type for your drives are SSD or HDD in Windows 10 without having to physically look at them or use 3rd party software.
A HDD (hard disk drive) is an electro-mechanical data storage device that uses magnetic storage to store and retrieve digital information using one or more rigid rapidly rotating disks (platters) coated with magnetic material. The platters are paired with magnetic heads, usually arranged on a moving actuator arm, which read and write data to the platter surfaces. Data is accessed in a random-access manner, meaning that individual blocks of data can be stored or retrieved in any order and not only sequentially. HDDs are a type of non-volatile storage, retaining stored data even when powered off.
A SSD (solid state drive), is a solid-state storage device that uses integrated circuit assemblies as memory to store data persistently. It is also sometimes called a solid-state device or a solid-state disk, although SSDs do not have physical disks. SSDs can use traditional hard disk drive (HDD) interfaces and form factors, or newer interfaces and form factors that exploit specific advantages of the flash memory in SSDs. Traditional interfaces (e.g., SATA and SAS) and standard HDD form factors allow such SSDs to be used as drop-in replacements for HDDs in computers and other devices. Newer form factors such as mSATA, M.2, U.2, and EDSFF (formerly known as Ruler SSD) and higher speed interfaces such as NVMe over PCI Express can increase performance over HDD performance. SSDs have no moving mechanical components. This distinguishes them from conventional electromechanical drives such as HDDs or floppy disks, which contain spinning disks and movable read-write heads. Compared with electromechanical drives, SSDs are typically more resistant to physical shock, run silently, and have quicker access time and lower latency. While the price of SSDs has continued to decline over time, SSDs are still more expensive per unit of storage than HDDs and are expected to remain so into the next decade.
This tutorial will show you how to see if a disk type is SSD (solid state drive) or HDD (hard disk drive) in Windows 10.