Hard Drive Spins Down Randomly

Sushisource

Okay, so this has really been pissing me off recently. I'm running Vista HP 32, and my secondary drive keeps spinning down randomly after just a few minutes. I know it's not a hardware thing, because this problem doesn't exist in linux.

It's super annoying because the system will hang up for two seconds or so when I need a file from that drive while it spins back up, not to mention the damage it's doing to the drive.

After tons and tons of googling I've only found two options: turn off the power management of hard disks (I think this works, but I would like them to turn off after 30 minutes or so), or remove this one specific update. Which I did, and it seemed to work until the next time I turned my system on.

Do you guys know any way to fix this bullshit?

victor_c26

That's exactly what it is, Power Management. I just set power management to never turn off my Hard Disks.

But yeah, it's enabled to like 15 minutes I think by default.

Setting it to 30 minutes doesn't work?

Sushisource

Nope. Setting it to 30 seems to do nothing. It'll still spin down at random, from 30 seconds after access time, to 5 minutes. It's wonky.

flammiebc

I ran across this problem earlier running vista 32-bit business, and I've even had this occur while loading area data (reading from the HD) just running across zones in City of Heroes; the only long term fix I've come across is to disable the hard disk power management settings entirely like you found.

I just found it amusing that this always seemed to happen in the middle of disk accesses...you would think that they would reset the power management timers on IO interrupts, but that's MS for ya.

Sushisource

It's really the only significant problem I've had with vista. It's so strange too. Ah well, thanks anyways guys.