Windows 7 and the power management evil

Hello everyone,
I haven't had any chance to test this deeply as I would like but anyways that is.
I suggest everyone with more than 1 Hard disk drive to disable the feature that switches off the hard drives after x minutes of inactivity as this caused me issues to the hard drive (bad sectors).
I got an error from Utorrent ran a chdsk c: /r and got a list of files with problems. The hard drive is pretty new and the last time I remember of such an issue is when I installed vista and I solved it disabling this feature at that time.

Anyone else has verified this thing?

Deviad said:

Hello everyone,
I haven't had any chance to test this deeply as I would like but anyways that is.
I suggest everyone with more than 1 Hard disk drive to disable the feature that switches off the hard drives after x minutes of inactivity as this caused me issues to the hard drive (bad sectors).
I got an error from Utorrent ran a chdsk c: /r and got a list of files with problems. The hard drive is pretty new and the last time I remember of such an issue is when I installed vista and I solved it disabling this feature at that time.

Anyone else has verified this thing?

No, i actually always leave it disabled.
I don't like Windows turning off things without my consent. :P

AlexRD said:

Deviad said:

Hello everyone,
I haven't had any chance to test this deeply as I would like but anyways that is.
I suggest everyone with more than 1 Hard disk drive to disable the feature that switches off the hard drives after x minutes of inactivity as this caused me issues to the hard drive (bad sectors).
I got an error from Utorrent ran a chdsk c: /r and got a list of files with problems. The hard drive is pretty new and the last time I remember of such an issue is when I installed vista and I solved it disabling this feature at that time.

Anyone else has verified this thing?

No, i actually always leave it disabled.
I don't like Windows turning off things without my consent. :P

Yeah, I was looking for the panel to disable it. I normally turn off that feature but unfortunately it comes enabled by default.

In the end I investigated deeply the problem.
The Hard Disk is faulty, I tested it with Western Digital tool, this is the 4th or 5th HDD that I have to change in 11 years (since I started to use a computer).
I was pretty lucky because of that error prompted by Utorrent.
Probably otherwise I would have lost all of the data.
I could recover everything. Now I'm waiting for a new hard drive. Probably I will buy a western digital. A friend of mine who is a retailer told me he had some cases in a row of faulty Seagate HDDs hence he suggested me to go for WD (just the same brand of hd that gave me the issue, but I had the same with Seagate in the past as well). At least now I have a decent PSU (Enermax Galaxy 1000W), so this excludes the PSU as a cause.

What do you think about it?

The hard disk is still covered by warranty but I have to pay 20 - 25 € for shipping it to France to get back a refurbished one.
A new one costs 50 - 70 €. If I was crazy and I wished to buy a Velociraptor (that's the name if I'm not mistaken) I would pay it 150 €.


I wish I could buy a SSD but their cost is huge at the moment, maybe in a couple of years I will be able to buy a decent 250 GB for 100 - 150 €.

Regards,
Davide

I'm using a gaggle of Seagates, and they did have some potential firmware problems with a run of them. I updated the firmware and have had no problems. I have sent a drive for warranty replacement to Seagate in the past and the process was quick and relatively painless.