Question: Is there a way for me to see if my hard drive is actually spinning or in sleep mode under Windows 7?I am looking for answers for both internal and external hard drives; they don’t always have a light to indicate their status.
Answer: The smartctl command-line utility of smartmontools offers exactly this functionality with the -n switch.From the man page:
?
-n POWERMODE, –nocheck=POWERMODE ?[ATA only] Specifies if smartctl should exit before performing any checks when the device is in a low-power mode. It may be used to ?prevent a disk from being spun-up by smartctl.
It works from a non-elevated terminal even as the only option argument, which makes its use pretty straightforward for internal drives: ?
> smartctl.exe -n standby d:smartctl 6.5 2016-05-07 r4318 [x86_64-w64-mingw32-win10] (sf-6.5-1)Copyright (C) 2002-16, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.orgd:: Device is in STANDBY (OS) mode, exit(2)
whereas a spinning drive reports Device is in ACTIVE or IDLE mode
External drives and/or exotic controllers might be more tricky and require you to read up on the -d switch.