"Powering up"

[quano]

I have this weird issue in win7 x64 that sometimes, programs will freeze their execution, and my computer will make this "powering up" sound for maybe about 5 seconds, and then the program will continue to run. It doesn't seem to be random. It usually happens in conjunction with some action that I or a program does. For example, this has happened when I ran a program installation wizard. On one of the steps (after klicking next), this would happen. Another example is when I started winamp, and then clicked play (it would happen when I clicked play).

Any idea what might be going on here? I'm suspecting it is somekind of harddrive thing. Maybe win7 is putting certain drives to sleep, and then wake them up when it needs to. But I don't understand why it would wake one up in the case of the installation wizard, as I did not install the program on another drive than the main, C drive. The music resides on another drive though, so that would make sense. (I've got 5 harddrives.)

 

[Jonathan_King]

Yep, you put your finger right on it. That is the hard drive spinning up, resuming from sleep.

Windows has a "better safe than sorry" policy for hard drives; if it thinks they might need to be used, it wakes them up.

In your case, the installation didn't know if you were going to choose to install on the other hard drive, so it played it safe and woke it up.

 

[quano]

Allright, thanks for the reply!

 

[quano]

Is there a way to turn this off? I'm starting to find it increasingly annoying.

 

[Jonathan_King]

Since I posted, I learned it is more of a feature of the drive itself. Let me guess, you have a Green, low-power, low-heat drive, correct?

The green drives do turn themselves off quicker to save power, and without modifying the firmware on the drive, you can't change it.

 

[quano]

Since I posted, I learned it is more of a feature of the drive itself. Let me guess, you have a Green, low-power, low-heat drive, correct?

The green drives do turn themselves off quicker to save power, and without modifying the firmware on the drive, you can't change it.

Green, low-power, low-heat drive? I don't know. There are, as previously mentioned, 5 drives, 4 of which are normal disk drives I transferred from my old win xp computer, and 1 new SSD drive. On my win xp installation, I never had this problem with having to wait for these harddrives.

 

[Bill]

Since I posted, I learned it is more of a feature of the drive itself. Let me guess, you have a Green, low-power, low-heat drive, correct?

The green drives do turn themselves off quicker to save power, and without modifying the firmware on the drive, you can't change it.

Green, low-power, low-heat drive? I don't know. There are, as previously mentioned, 5 drives, 4 of which are normal disk drives I transferred from my old win xp computer, and 1 new SSD drive. On my win xp installation, I never had this problem with having to wait for these harddrives.

If you go into device manager you can find out your HD model #. (right click computer, properties. Link on the left hand side at the top). Once we know that, we can look it up and see if it is one of those drives.

Bill

 

[quano]

 

[Jonathan_King]

The only thing I can find is that your SamSung drive uses "Device Initiated Power Management" which I'm guessing is that annoying feature.

Newegg.com - SAMSUNG Spinpoint F1 HD753LJ 750GB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Hard Drive -Bare Drive

 

[quano]

Thanks.

Hm, so there's nothing I can do about it?

 

[Jonathan_King]

I don't think so.

You can try setting your power plan to High Performance, and see if that helps any.

 

[quano]

Wow, I just found this.

Don't know if it'll work yet but I think it might!

 

[fseal]

Yeah under the power options in the control panel, the monitor and hard drive are set to sleep after like 10 and 20 minutes by default for the default power mode. If you want your drive to never sleep while the machine is on you definately have to go there and select "never" for the current power mode. Or switch to using the high power power mode as JK suggested.

[Edit] Ooops, you found it while I was typing [/edit]

 

[quano]

Just to clarify: to select "Never", enter 0. Or at least that's what I did and it seems to work.