"Powering up"

I have this weird issue in win7 x64 that sometimes, programs will freeze their execution, and my computer will make this "powering up" sound for maybe about 5 seconds, and then the program will continue to run. It doesn't seem to be random. It usually happens in conjunction with some action that I or a program does. For example, this has happened when I ran a program installation wizard. On one of the steps (after klicking next), this would happen. Another example is when I started winamp, and then clicked play (it would happen when I clicked play).

Any idea what might be going on here? I'm suspecting it is somekind of harddrive thing. Maybe win7 is putting certain drives to sleep, and then wake them up when it needs to. But I don't understand why it would wake one up in the case of the installation wizard, as I did not install the program on another drive than the main, C drive. The music resides on another drive though, so that would make sense. (I've got 5 harddrives.)

Allright, thanks for the reply!

Is there a way to turn this off? I'm starting to find it increasingly annoying.

Jonathan_King said:

Since I posted, I learned it is more of a feature of the drive itself. Let me guess, you have a Green, low-power, low-heat drive, correct?

The green drives do turn themselves off quicker to save power, and without modifying the firmware on the drive, you can't change it.

Green, low-power, low-heat drive? I don't know. There are, as previously mentioned, 5 drives, 4 of which are normal disk drives I transferred from my old win xp computer, and 1 new SSD drive. On my win xp installation, I never had this problem with having to wait for these harddrives.

Thanks.

Hm, so there's nothing I can do about it?