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Hard Drive turning on and off constantly.

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WhiteCrane

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Phenom 940X @ 3.1 Ghz
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Discussion starter · #1 ·
Hey all, I threw an IDE drive in what is primarily a SATA system. Its a slave I use for data storage of files. NOT applications. Its my 2nd hard drive. It doesnt contain windows.

Every minute ot powers up for like 5 seconds and then powers down. I am worried about the longevity of the drive, and I don't understand why Vista (32) is doing this to my drive. XP didn't do this.

I would like to somehow tell Vista to only read the drive when needed, and once it reads from it, to leeve it on for a few minutes in anticipation that I'll read from it again. I can find no such option but as I'm new to Vista and everyone on this forum has had great advice in thepast I was hoping someone could give me a hand here.

Thanks guys!

EDIT: Sorry if this should have gone under Hard Drives and Storage. I felt it belonged here as it is WINDOWS turning the drive on and off, and the drive itself is functioning perfectlty.
 
Discussion starter · #3 ·
No, im truly not requesting ANY daya from the drive, it starts to spin when im doing things like web browsing. I keep my OLD stuff on the drive that I look at infrequently.

Im considering copying all the files onto my main drive, formatting the old one and then dragging the files back to make sure no apps on the old drive are trying to run. Make sense?
 
#4 ·
This was happening to me too and I thought my drives were dying. Try this: go to power management and "edit" the power profile that is currently running and scroll down to "hard drive", click the + and select never for both of the options. After doing this my drives have never turned off. It seems that once that set time has passed, the drive turns off and if anything accesses the drive, it will turn on for that brief moment and turn back off. Since I have many programs open all the time, both drives that are not my main drives were spinning up and down constantly.
 
Discussion starter · #5 ·
The only options under Hard Drives in Power Options is a question of how much time I want to pass b4 the drives shut off.

But the C drive never shuts off anyway, and the other one (lets call it D) goes on and off like a bad car alarm. I don;t see any helpful options.

Is this gonna break my drive?
 
#8 ·
Quote:

Originally Posted by WhiteCrane View Post
Okay, I'll do that but won;t constantly being turned on kill the longevity of the drives?
No, the constant spin-up and slowdown of the drive will burn it out much faster
 
#9 ·
Quote:

Originally Posted by Penicilyn View Post
No, the constant spin-up and slowdown of the drive will burn it out much faster
Ya I was gonna say, that's murder on the drives. Mine's been doing the same crap recently and I thought it might be an HDD problem but I changed the HDD power settings in Vista and it's fine now (****ing Microsoft shouldn't be making this setting a default and hard to find). One (or more) of my drives were constantly powering on/off quickly every 5-10 minutes or less, hardly "power saving" and very frustrating.
 
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