HD Spins Down Frequently

[Warhaven]

My system has two drives, a 1TB Samsung Spinpoint F1 that has all my backup and whatnot, and my boot drive, which is a 500GB Hitachi Deskstar P7K500. Here's the problem: My boot drive keeps spinning down every 10 minutes or so, regardless of what I'm doing, and despite any power saving options to the contrary. It doesn't do this under Windows Vista, so I'm not inclined to believe the HD is failing.

In any event, you can see how this might cause problems when gaming, as a game will stall while the HD spins up again to access cache or whatever -- which usually leads to the game quitting unexpectedly. I have the latest drivers and firmware for my motherboard installed.

Any suggestions?

[edit]

It just donned on me to try turning off the "Put HD to sleep" option, but if anyone has some other suggestions for me to try when I get home, I'm all ears.

Thanks,
-Rob

 

[Brink]

Hello Rob, and welcome to Seven Forums.

Have you already tried having it set to more than 10 minutes?



Hope this helps,
Shawn

 

[Warhaven]

Thanks for the response. The problem isn't the time length, it's the fact that the drive is spinning down while a process is accessing the drive, causing the process to halt and wait for the drive to immediately spin up again -- which would, for example, cause WoW to crash.

If there's disc access, it shouldn't be spinning down the drive at all. In any event, I've simply turned it off (set to 0) and that solved the problem.

 

[Brink]

I've found that turning this off works best. Like you anytime something needed to access the drive that spinned down, it would cause a delay (as expected) for the drive to spin back up. I got tired of waiting as well.