Hard disk going in and out of standby state

[f1ux]

I just installed vista 64bit on my Gigabyte Ga-965p-ds3 system and after i installed the two new performance patches i noticed that one of my hard disks keeps going in and out of its standby state as if i have power-saving enabled (which i dont, i disabled it)

It seems to do it fairly randomly, it will turn off for maybe 30seconds- 2minutes then come back on for a few minutes and do the same.

Im pretty sure it didnt do it before the performance patches anyway!

If i reboot back into vista its all ok again.

I've installed the latest chipset drivers and vista updates, does anyone else suffer the same thing?

Power saving is currently set to NEVER turn off the hard-disks

cheers

crunchie

[+Fulcrum Subscriber¹]

Maybe a BIOS Setting is Overriding Windows.

There are many tools out there that can read the sensors on Hard Drives, they can confirm if you're settings are being correctly applied.

Do you have enough System Memory for Vista, otherwise Windows will cache things to disk.

Also, i'm unaware whether this is a common issue on Vista, otherwise you might get more help in the hardware forum - ask a mod to move this if you like.

[+LogicalApex MVC]

My question is how do you know the HDs are going into a sleep state?

[f1ux]

My question is how do you know the HDs are going into a sleep state?

Well it turns off and on in the same way that they do when you have hdd sleep after xx Minutes enabled. ie try to access a partition on that drive and it turns on again.

[+LogicalApex MVC]

Well it turns off and on in the same way that they do when you have hdd sleep after xx Minutes enabled. ie try to access a partition on that drive and it turns on again.

How are you able to know for certain that it is off? Maybe if you held your ear to the drive and heard it spin down? As if you're basing your information on the hearing of the head move onto the platters (which you can hear on some drives)... Most modern drives move the head off the platter for safety reasons (as a head crash will kill the drive)...

Also, use the HD utility from the drive manufacturer as some drives have their own power related settings that they adhere to internally. I've used a laptop drive like that where I had to boot teh HD maker's util to adjust the drive's settings outside of those set by Windows.

[ViperAFK]

It may be a setting in the power options. Vista shut off my spare drive after a certain time of inactivity.

[f1ux]

I've checked the power options and ive set it to not turn off the hdd's.

@ frazell,

Yes i can clearly hear it spin up and spin down, Western digi drives are quite loud as the spin up/spin down then get quiet as they are at full spin up speed. I'm giong to try it on the gigabyte sata ports instead of the intel ones and see what happens

[UAC]

Hard disk going in and out of standby state

I have the same problem, but I haven't installed these patches.

My PC has 2 hard disk drives: primary HDD with Vista (indexed) and secondary HDD for data (not indexed).

The secondary hard disk goes in standby because I don't use it, but sometimes it returns "ON" although I didn't use it!!! Why? And so my secondary HDD goes in and out of standby state on random hours, although I don't use it.

May be there's a bug in some Vista components or in a 3rd party application which write on a secondary hard disk (a temporary file or something else) ?

Edited August 15, 2007 by UAC

[ViperAFK]

I have the same problem, but I haven't installed these patches.

My PC has 2 hard disk drives: primary HDD for Vista (indexed) and secondary HDD for data (not indexed).

The secondary hard disk goes in standby because I don't use it, but sometimes it returns "ON" although I didn't use it!!! Why? And so my secondary HDD goes in and out of standby state on random hours, although I don't use it.

May be there's a bug in some Vista components or in a 3rd party application which write on a secondary hard disk (a temporary file or something else) ?

It seemed to happen to me when I opened certain applications even though they ahd no need to access the drive, not sure if it's a problem with vista or the apps.

[Corvid19]

I am also having this issue since installing the performance and reliability packs, it is very random and I think it is only affecting my 2nd IDE drive.

[raskren]

I am also having this issue since installing the performance and reliability packs, it is very random and I think it is only affecting my 2nd IDE drive.

Same here. The drive I primarily use for data (non-OS) is doing the same thing.

[Brian M. Veteran]

Same's occuring here. It's only affects my second (IDE) drive which isnt accessed very often (keeps a disk image of the computer incase it fails while it's away from the network).

When you try to access the partition, it spins up again. I doubt it would harm the disk doing this, and it's literally to save evergy.

[ServerKing]

Could this be causing my explorer crashing? I have 2 SATA drives 1 raptor 150 and 1 500gb internal. After my computer has been on for a while and using it when I try to access either drive explorer will crash and make me reboot to get it back up. I havent had this problem since the latest patches. I am unable to tell if my drives are shutting down but I am damn sure in power profiles on MB and windows say never turn off hard drives. It really gets annoying when I do photo editing and constantly have to access the other drive and poof explorer crashes. Vista 64 Business is what I am running

[simonallison]

I too have the trouble with the Second Hard Drive powering down.

I have turned off Bios settings, turned off hdd's in power options.

I will let you all know what happens.

[FATILA]

Yes I have noticed this happening since the patches, although I have not seen it recently. Normally the drives wold go to sleep aftera certain period pf inactivity (which is fine) but various drives seemed to be powering down even though they had been used moments before (I can hear my drives turning on or off).

[Yehonathan]

I have also noticed this, its since a week or so i have 4 HD's 2 rapto's in raid0 and 2 other data drives and it seems that only one of the latest two are going down..

I can hear it going down and when i browse to the drive with the explorer its hanging then spin up and i have access again...

its quite odd why.

If my HD will break becouse of 100 times a day powering on and off i will claim it by Microsoft including data recovery!

[IceBreakerG]

I noticed one of my hard drives doing this about a week and a half to 2 weeks ago as well. I thought one of my drives was failing (had me really worried). Then I find this thread and see that I'm not the only one. I verified that I have the power options set to never turn off my hard disks but it still does it to 1 of them. I'm positive it did not do this before those performance patches. I can hear the drive spinning up and down, and it does it like every couple minutes.

[jml401]

this crap has also been happening to me with my second IDE drive. glad I'm not alone! before I installed the performance and reliability patches, I had the same problem but fixed it when I changed the power scheme from "High Performance" to "Balanced". after I installed the patches, it makes no difference now and I'm damn tired of the hard drive clicking on and off. Microsoft???

[ZealotTC]

same ****s happens to me, sometimes even when playing a movie from my second IDE and that freezes it so it's pretty god damn fukcing annoying

[ViperAFK]

You could try this, worked for me

[franzon]

the problem is not when your HDD goes "off",

but the problem is when your HDD returns "on" and you didn't access it: this happens to me!

[Chris Wheeler]

I too am getting this problem. Vista is configured to 'Never' put the hard drives to sleep. I did have 3 SATA drives, and a couple of weeks ago I could head one powering up/down quite frequently, so I assumed it was on its way out - so now I have 4 hard drives!

The Drives are:

SATA Port 0 - 200GB Seagate (Vista 64 installed on this one)

SATA Port 1 - 200GB Maxtor (Was full, now formatted)

SATA Port 2 - 300GB Maxtor (Was full, now formatted)

SATA Port 3 - 500GB WD (New drive, now has data from drives on ports 1 & 2)

I'm using an Intel Mobo, with a Pentium D 530, and 2GB Ram.

The Maxtors make distinctly different sounds to the WD drive when spinning up, and I can tell drives 1,2 & 3 are definatly spinning up/down at seemingly random intervals of between 30seconds and 20 minutes.

This often coincides with opening/closing of applications.

I've turned off page files/recycle bin and everything else I could think of which might be accessing the drives, i've also formatted two of them - and yet vista still powers them off/on ?

The machine often freezes for the 2/3 seconds it takes for the drives to power up/down - so its rather annoying!

[richard tired of vista]

I had the problem my secondary disks spining down and up after last Tuesday's Vista patch released. I deinstalled patch KB938979, "improve performance", rebooted and the problem went away. Of course the next day, Vista automatically reinstalled the patch and the problem was back. After setting it to download but not install patches automatically, I deinstalled the patch again and the problem again went away. I don't know if this will work for others, but it worked for me.

Richard

[idbirch2]

I am also having this problem and it's very annoying! I have 5 SATA hard disks and 1 IDE. 2 of the SATA drives are dynamic and spanned and just contain HD movies. The problem is, even though I have set hard disks to never power down in the Vista Power Options, they seem to spin down almost immediately after they stop being used.

Try and empty recycle bin - "bzzt! brrrrrrrr mmmmmm" Now I can empty it. 30 seconds later- "MMMMmmmm...." and its spun down again - arrghh!!!! Why?!!?

[hungryleon]

Same problem here.

System specs:

-Vista 32bit EN, Business Edition

-Intel Core 2 Duo CPU

-Asrock 775Dual-VSTA (VIA PT880 Pro/Ultra Chipset)

-2x Samsung SATA Hard disk connected to motherboard

-1x Samsung SATA Hard disk connect to Sweex SATA PCI controller

-Vista HD standy set to 60 minutes (although it's more like 60 seconds)

The harddisk spinning down (shortly after last access) is the one connected to the Sweex controller. The other HD's probably suffer the same problem, but I use them more constantly so the problem doesn't show up on them.

Here also some people with this problem:

http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/ShowPo...17&pageid=0