HDD - delays when accessing

Hoods · 24 Oct 2012

Hi - lately there is some problem with my hard drives taking some time to react again after they've been quiet for a while. I have had my hardware setup for some time now and this delay is recent - either that or I have only just noticed!!

I have three drives as below, with my system operating from a Sata 3 and all my data on two 1TB Sata II drives. The delay occurs when accessing either drive. Once the drives have clicked in (it's an audible click) all is fine until after another period of them doing nothing. I am hoping this isn't a hardware issue. Is that likely??

Is there a setting somewhere I can change to stop this happening, i.e. to keep the drives in a state of alertness? :)

System: Hitachi 500GB HDS721050DLE630 ATA Device
Primary data disk: SAMSUNG HD103UJ ATA Device
Secondary data disk: ST31000333AS ATA Device
Motherboard: Gigabyte UD3R-SLI

x BlueRobot · 24 Oct 2012

You could test the drives for any bad sectors, by using this tutorial:

Disk Check

Hope this helps,

Harry

LittleJay · 24 Oct 2012

You could try going into Power Options in the Control Panel and then opening "Change Plan Settings". Once there, you can open "change advanced power settings" and under "hard disk" you can set the value to "0" minutes and see if that helps.

Slartybart · 24 Oct 2012

IT would be a good idea to run chkdsk, as xBlue recommends. The click could be indicative of drive issues. Or it could be as Little Jay suspects that it is the drives powering up.

I think LJ meant set it to Never (which is essentially 0). Some drives park the heads after some predetermined inactivity, so the one click you hear when you access the drive tehn might be "normal". If you hear continuous clicking or a racheting sound - save your data pronto.

LittleJay said:

You could try going into Power Options in the Control Panel and then opening "Change Plan Settings". Once there, you can open "change advanced power settings" and under "hard disk" you can set the value to "0" minutes and see if that helps.

Hoods · 25 Oct 2012

LittleJay said:

You could try going into Power Options in the Control Panel and then opening "Change Plan Settings". Once there, you can open "change advanced power settings" and under "hard disk" you can set the value to "0" minutes and see if that helps.

Excellent LittleJay - that sorted it out, thanks very much. This is a new problem, as I said, and as I haven't ever changed those settings, it's really odd that the HDDs were set to "sleep" after 5 minutes. I had never gone into advanced power options before, so knowing what's there is been very useful. I knew it wasn't likely to a hardware issue because there are three drives involved all doing the same thing.

LittleJay · 25 Oct 2012

Hoods said:

LittleJay said:

You could try going into Power Options in the Control Panel and then opening "Change Plan Settings". Once there, you can open "change advanced power settings" and under "hard disk" you can set the value to "0" minutes and see if that helps.

Excellent LittleJay - that sorted it out, thanks very much. This is a new problem, as I said, and as I haven't ever changed those settings, it's really odd that the HDDs were set to "sleep" after 5 minutes. I had never gone into advanced power options before, so knowing what's there is been very useful. I knew it wasn't likely to a hardware issue because there are three drives involved all doing the same thing.

You are welcome. Glad to hear things are working. I had exactly the same issue with my HDDs spinning down, when they hadn't been accessed for a period of time.