Best Practice HDD Management

Don't do spindown either but use Autoshutdown.

Greetings
David

(having searched the forum for further info on this without finding anything.. other than similar questions!)

Can someone please provide a description as to what the "Advanced Power Management" setting does AND the relationship to the "Spindown time" setting?

I see the various settings within APM - half of which spindown disks, the other half use standby instead - but where does the spindown time come in? Sure the level of APM affects the 'aggressiveness' of when the spindown/standby occurs? Also you can set a spindown time when APM is disabled - further suggesting these two are not in fact related / one a parameter of the other.

On my old setup I had APM set to one and spindown time set to 20 minutes (on the thinking this would spin down after, erm, 20 minutes of inactivity!) however having recently relocated the box somewhere quieter and where I can actually hear it it would appear to be spinning down much much earlier than 20 minutes - suggesting the APM setting is controlling it and not the 20 minutes setting???

..if someone is feeling brave they could also attempt explaining how the acoustic settings play into this too - tbh I've always just left these to disabled!

As always, many thanks in advance.