Thought: Turning SATA drives On/Off? (HTPC)

[fragged]

Hey, this is just a thought, and by no means do I plan on taking this project on in the near future, just wondering if it could work... If you feel the need you can take this project on yourself, so long as you release all the source code / details

So I hear that Sata drives are hot swappable (bar the windows drive) although I have never used them. What I have used however is 2.5" drives with a full size IDE converter. These are somewhat quieter than regular drives... So this was my thought, say you were to build a HTPC, and install the OS components onto a laptop hard drive (or solid state storage) and then use a controller to turn a SATA drive(s) on to view files, when you've decided which to watch, it copies it to the laptop drive or RAM, beguins playing it, and turn the SATA drive off again, allowing for closer-to-silent HTPC capabilities. Would this be possible? any thoughts on it?

I know you can have the ability to turn power on/off to anything via a serial cable and electrical components (my electronics is teh sukc) an example would be here Here although it only controls 12v and ground (also needs 6v and another gnd) and programming it would be a pain in the rectum (not to mention implementing it inside an open source media centre) but for the audiophiles out there it would be appreciated

Any thoughts?
-Fragged

[Airbozo]

I will check, but one of the _free_ disks I got with a magazine had a utility like that. It was specifically for hot swappable drives (sata or scsi) and I am sure that it would not be that hard to implement that on any system. It allowed you to manually spin down drives although the voltage was still present on the power line (usually needed to keep the drive electronics active so windows/linux/whatever still sees the drive). I will go through my disks when I get home.