HDD spin up at win shut down

Hi!

I have this very annoying problem. Everytime I shut down windows all the HDD that have gone to sleep earlier spin up then they instantly spin down and windows shuts down. Even my external USB HDD behave the same when I have it connected.
Every spin up is shortening their lives so I would be glad if I could get this unnecessary spin up to stop.

What is it that windows writes to them and how can I disable it, while still being able to have the HDD's go to sleep?

My HDD configuration: 2xSATA(one using a IDE to SATA converter), 1xIDE, 1x ext.USB

There may be other answers, but here's my take on the situation.

When Windows shuts down it has to close programs and files. It can't do that on a drive that's at rest. The drive must be accessed by windows to make sure there are no open files on it and if there are, they must be closed.

The only way I can see to eliminate this is to make sure the drives never shut down.
That's a setting in Power Management.

Letting a drive run all day puts a lot more wear and tear on it than just letting it spin up for a few seconds during shut-down. Also, a drive at rest, draws very little power and produces very little heat.

I always set my drives to power down after about ten minutes of inactivity. The drives stay cooler and last a very long time. I also put two-fan coolers on all my hard drives so they always stay at room temperature. I've never lost a hard drive since I started doing this....many years ago.

Good Luck,
The Doctor

I have a Quick Shutdown icon on my desktop.
Using that, my XP or even W7 PC shuts down in 5 to 8 seconds, even though all three HD's have to spin up briefly. It's no biggie!

Finally someone with the same problem. Haven't found the answer yet so my sleeping drives are still spinning up before windows can shut down. And there is no difference with having closed all programs or not =(