Vista: HDD turning on and off

[swaaye]

One of my drives keeps powering off and on while sitting in Vista. It's probably a 5 minute interval, unrelated to activity, and no matter what I set Vista's HDD timeout to, it just keeps going on and off. I've set it to never turn off now but haven't had a chance to listen to find out if that stops it....

Anyone else run into this? It doesn't happen in XP on my comp, and I did find others having the prob by doing a Google search. One guy suggested it could be a power supply issue, but I don't think so as I have a highly-rated, excessive 600W OCZ PSU and XP is fine.

I have 3 drives in this comp. The only one with the issue is the WD2500KS. The 150 gig Raptor and 500 gig WD5000 are fine. The board is a Gigabyte P35-DS3R. Q6600, 4 gigs RAM, Vista Ult 64-bit.

I did try changing SATA port and wiggling the power connector. It's currently using the SATA power plug, but it also has the legacy 4-pin power so maybe I'll try that too.

 

[K.I.L.E.R]

It fucking shits me too. I thought my HD was dying because it clicked when it started to do heavy HD ops.
Found out it was under power management and when the HD was inactive for 20m it would shut off. The click was the same when I boot up my PC. Set the HD turn off option to 0 to disable it under advanced power management and issue went away.

Damn Microsoft, I'm running a desktop PC not a fucking laptop.

 

[BRiT]

Disable Hard Drive Suspend / Sleep within BIOS.

 

[swaaye]

Disable Hard Drive Suspend / Sleep within BIOS.

I'll look for that.

But turning the timeout in Vista to "never" stopped the on/off stuff anyway. This little quirk has been bugging me for weeks. It took a long time to figure out which drive it was and I have two comps next to each other so I wasn't even sure which computer it was! Finally managed to figure it out by listening for it and then browsing files on each drive to figure out which one was powered down (would make it spin back up). Crazyness.

 

[Davros]

hang on, if this problem was so minor that you couldnt even tell what pc it was happening on how did you know it was happening and why did it worry you ?

 

[swaaye]

cuz having a hdd turning on and off every few mins has to be terrible for its lifespan. Motors don't like the spin up part. And it didn't even stay off, it would turn back on for no apparent reason.

 

[_xxx_]

"No apparent reason" might be the swap file located on that drive?

 

[swaaye]

Nope. I checked that and it is on another drive. That still wouldn't explain why it was turning on and off inside a few minutes. If the swap was on that drive, it would turn off then turn back on but remain on until the defined timeout elapses. I had the timeout set for 90 mins.

 

[Maintank]

Very interesting, I have the same board and my WD drive constantly does the same thing. What sucks is it will happen in games and cause the game to hang while the drive fires up.

I set the power settings to never turn off the drive and havent noticed if it is still doing the same. So I assuming like you it fixed my issue.

It was weird though because the default power setting had it at 30 mins. But the drive would spin down and up every few mins and it wasnt on a set time either. There would be times it would spin down, spin up, 20 seconds later spin down then back up and stay up for a few mins and go down. Then other times it wouldnt spin down for hours.

I also noticed it when not gaming because it would make this sound as the motor initialized.

 

[swaaye]

Yup sounds like the same thing. Maybe it's some sort of mobo ACPI issue.... no idea.