Windows 7: Secondary SATA HD Turns off

I've searched for an answer, but just can't seem to find the solution.

My secondary HD, used for storage and backup, turns off at after about 5 minutes. This is a 1 TB drive used for storing all of my videos, music and photos. The problem is that I access this drive quite often; edit a photo or video, play music, etc.

Each time I to access a file, I have this delay, where I must wait for what seems like the system to mount the drive and allow access. The delay is about 7 seconds, but it's driving me nuts!

I've tried adjusting power management without success. Any ideas?

Could you please fill in your system specs? Also, what external HD are you using?

Specs are complete.
Western Digital 160gb SATA: OS
Seagate 1tb SATA: Storage

That's better than 4 hours trying to repair itself!

Agreed, but a completely different topic. This drive is suspending after a short period of time, and I would rather it not

Could you please give the model of your storage HD?

ST31000340AS Barracuda 7200.11 SATA 3Gb/s 1-TB Hard Drive | Seagate

I will try to get back to you in the next few days, as I am pretty busy, but in the meantime, someone else might post in.

i think its the problem of the drive.i m having the same problem.Its a 500 gb seagate hdd.internal,SATA.ST3500830.Barracuda 7200.10.After googling for few days i came to the conclusion,seagate s..ks!

Hi there
This is a problem I've noticed with a few SATA drives (> 500GB) - you can hear a "whirr" as it starts into action.


Look around the system and see if you can change all the power options to never turning off discs. Might not work (Didn't make any difference on systems I've been testing).

It might be that these large discs have an "automatic" quiesce built into their hardware either to reduce power consumption (we all have to please the "Tree Huggers" these days) or increase "MTBF" - Mean time before Failure - for non Engineers.

It IS annoying.

You could try switching off ACPI on the BIOS (means a re-install of Windows) -- not sure whether that will work.

I think it's DEFINITELY something in Windows 7 as I restored a W2K3 server image to the identical partition I had for Windows 7 ( a 40 GB partition) leaving all the other disks intact - didn't get the problem - although of course a Server has I/O optimised as it should.

Definitely a problem AFAIK with the Windows 7 I/O algorithm with large SATA disks it seems.

(I think 4 sec might be a bit long --4 secs is actually a LONG time -- 1 or 2 secs is probably more like it - but there is DEFINITELY a delay).

Mine are HITACHI Drives, 1 X 750 GB and 1 X 1.0TB - so it's not just SEAGATE - unless these are just "Rebadged" Seagate ones.

If you love conspiracy theories -- it's probably some new fiendish plot dreamt up by the EU commission to halve our Electricity consumption while paying 2X the price by the year 2012.


Cheers
jimbo