Question : Problem: turning off second hard drive in laptop

hopefully my question is simple but it is still worth 500 points to me. anyway i have a laptop with 2 different hard drives in it. i use one for the operating system and then one to put data files on that i want to keep. is there a way to turn off the power to that second hard drive to help save on battery life?

Answer : Problem: turning off second hard drive in laptop

"... if i disable the hdd in hardware manager will it turn off the power to the hdd? " ==> No.  Disabling a drive not only disables it, but also disables all power options associated with it;  so the drive will simply "spin away".

The best thing to do is just go into your Power options menu and set a very short interval for turning off the hard disks (say 1 or 2 minutes).   This will set BOTH disks to turn off after that interval -- but if you access one (say the primary disk), ONLY that one will spin back up ==> the other won't spin up until it is accessed.   I assume you know how to do this ... but just in case:  right-click on the desktop;  select Properties;  click on the Screen Saver tab;  click on the Power button;  now just set the "Turn off hard disks" time to whatever you want ...