Drive Power Manager

If you use a portable computer, you have probably faced situations when you do not have the possibility of plugging it to a power outlet and still you need it to stay on for a long time.

After all, that is why they are called “portable computers”. There are several tricks that will help you take the most out of your laptop’s battery, one of them has to do with lowering your hard disk power consumption. Some solutions involve reducing access to the hard disk by frequent defragmentation and optimizing your virtual memory’s swap file. Others imply putting your hard disks in standby or reducing performance for the sake of less power use. Although Windows power options will let you control some of these parameters, there are others that cannot be accessed by these means.
Drive Power Manager lets you manage the power consumption as well as the noise by your drives. The interface is very easy to use. As a first step, you can select the drive to manage. A first pane lets you manage drive power establishing a value ranging from minimum power with reduced performance (128) and high performance with high power demand (254) by dragging a slider. Besides, you can put an external hard disk in standby. The second pane will allow setting a value for noise control of CD, DVD or BD drives. The minimum value guarantees the lowest noise but less performance while the maximum value will do just the opposite.
Drive Power Manager is definitely a useful piece of software when you need to tweak your system’s power use.