HDD will not stay idle

[foreversilent004]

To help my power hungry T61 last while on battery power, I have my WD Scorpio set to turn off after 1 minute of being idle. This is great for class, I load up my notes at once at the beginning of lecture and just maximize life.

Thing is, the drive will not stay idle for longer than 40-50 seconds usually.

I have tried many things like turning off the pagefile, editing the registry to disable prefetching. The best impact was turning off indexing, though I like the utility a lot. Now my computer will shut off the HDD for about 2 minutes max, but it will still spin up to write to C:\$LogFile, and the C:\$MST, etc

Can anyone offer any insight? I would prefer my drive to stay off unless I specifically load a file or new application

Pic: what spools the HDD while being idle

 

[seekermeister]

There are any number of possibilities as to what is accessing the harddrive, so it would be difficult to make suggesions...except to download and install Filemon, so that you can monitor file access.

EDIT: Along with that, you might do the same with Regmon, since that is another type of harddrive access.

 

[foreversilent004]

Well that's what my screenshot is for. I watched to see what was writing to the drive when it spins up, it's always some sort of log file.

 

[seekermeister]

There is probably more going on that that, and that monitor doesn't tell you what is doing the writing, only where is is writing to.

EDIT: I Googled the programs that I mentioned, and found an MS article saying that they are no longer available for download, and were replace with Process Monitor, however I did find the programs available for download elsewhere.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896642.aspx

 

[foreversilent004]

So I'm trying to use Process Monitor, except my HDD will not go idle while the program! What am I missing?

 

[seekermeister]

I have not used Process Monitor yet, so I can only assume that it is somewhat like what I mentioned previously. It probably is showing a continous readout of all of the processes which are active. This means that you will need to monitor the readout and sort through the list, to see if there is anything that you can eliminate or control. Whether that is possible, after paring down to the minimum is yet to be seen.

 

[foreversilent004]

After watching for a bit, it looks like these two files are causing the drive to spin back up:

C:\Windows\ServiceProfiles\LocalService\AppData\Local\lastalive1.dat

C:\Users\Kris\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Themes\slideshow.ini


I don't know what the dat file is, but I do know that I have the slideshow disabled.

 

[seekermeister]

I'm going through some Google returns, but haven't found anything conclusive yet. However there was a mention in one thread that caught my eye. Check in the Task Scheduler and see if there is anything that is unnecessary there. I remember doing that about a week ago, and was surprised to find some items that I didn't put there.

 

[whs]

Go to Services and disable Windows Event Log and see whether that improves the situation.

 

[Frostmourne]

Windows 7 is always doing something in the background. You are worsening battery life by spinning the disk up and down. I'd set the option to 999 minutes and then ignore it. Battery life is affected by other options - for example my laptop can switch of the nvidia chip and run on the weak intel chip to imporve battery life.

 

[seekermeister]

Go to Services and disable Windows Event Log and see whether that improves the situation.

To do this, you will probably have to log into Safe Mode. When I tested it at normal desktop, it gave me an Access Denied error. I'm not certain this will solve your problem, but it did seem to slow down harddrive activity some, but it slowed down CPU activity more. I think that with this disabled it is the first time that I have ever seen CPU activity occassionally at 0%. It might also make it easier to see what is left running, because mousing over Process Explorer, I see processes that had been hidden previously.

I don't know how good of an idea it is to keep Windows Event Log disabled, because it is a very good diagnostic tool. However, I'm guessing that Windows will continued to produce minidump as necessary, and if so, I guess one could get by without it.

 

[seekermeister]

One of the processes that recurs a lot is the Desktop Windows Manager (DWM.exe), which controls certain aspects of how the desktop is displayed, like Aero, so is likely to be the cause of slideshow.ini running. You could disable this in services, if you could tolerate the basic theme.

 

[whs]

The best strategy would be to replace the HDD by an SSD. Then you would have a lot less power consumption - and less heat too.

 

[seekermeister]

The best strategy would be to replace the HDD by an SSD. Then you would have a lot less power consumption - and less heat too.

This would be an excellent idea, if he wouldn't mind downsizing from 320GBs to 30-40GBs due to the cost factor...or he has pockets deep enough to afford a larger drive, but considering the fact that he is a student, that isn't too likely, unless he has a silver spoon in his mouth.

 

[foreversilent004]

I would be willing to buy a miniPCIe SDD if my ThinkPad BIOS supported booting from it

 

[whs]

I would be willing to buy a miniPCIe SDD if my ThinkPad BIOS supported booting from it

If your PC can boot from Sata, then it can boot from an SSD. Here is a good deal of the day: Newegg.com - DANE-ELEC DA-SDM25-80G-N-T-MK 1.8" with 2.5" adapter SSD Migration Kit - SSD
I just ordered my second one. The first one is running Windows7 - really fast.