XP Hard Disk Timeout - rarely happens

[swaaye]

I have a box running XP. All it does is run Folding @ Home from a Ramdrive. There is no antivirus, or anything really running in the background. The hard disk should never be accessed. But still, Windows XP is doing something intermittently and it will rarely allow the disk to idle and turn off. I have the timeout set for an hour I believe. Sometimes it will turn of, only to power up a hour later or so. Very frustrating and bad for the drive.

I even put the Windows temp folder on the Ramdrive for a while. Also turned off task scheduler. Didn't help.

I'm almost ready to put Win98 on there. 98 doesn't do this nonsense.

 

[3dcgi]

I've been thinking about this issue recently, but I haven't gotten a chance to test with a ram drive. On my computer I noticed Zone Alarm is constantly writing to a log file so I don't know if a program like that would prevent the hard drive from spinning down. I wish Windows would support even more control than your're looking for. I'd like to be able to turn off the hard drive during a long meeting, yet still type notes. The drive would only spin up when I try to save my notes to the hard drive.

A program like FileMon might help isolate what process is trying to access the disk.
http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/source/filemon.shtml

EDIT: Is your ram drive set to emulate a hard disk or is does Windows recognize it as a ram drive? If it's emulating a hard disk then Windows might be getting confused and not spinning down the hard drive because it thinks a hard drive is in use.

 

[bdotobdot2]

It could be XP touching all the logical drives looking for changes, and/or XP doing something with the swap file.

 

[swaaye]

I was told this over on the Tech Report forum. It makes sense, and I didn't try turning the swap file off. So when I get a chance, that's my next plan.