Hard disk going in and out of standby state


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A workaround solution is to use noisestopper.exe (see attachment). A utility made by Midnight (from http://gathering.tweakers.net) to keep some specific Seagate HD's active, preventing them from making calibration noises. It simply writes some bytes to a random(?) file after x seconds, thus prevention the HD from going to standby. It writes to the HD on which the .exe is executed.

Dutch translation of the noisestopper options:

"Automatisch starten" = Start writing when noisestopper starts

"Starten met Windows" = Start on windows boot

"Geminimaliseerd starten" = Start minimalized

NoiseStopper.zip

  • 3 weeks later...
I've having the same issue with the harddrive going in and out of standby. Though I can't link it to any particular application.

Others have reported problems with their HD's spinning down after installing KB938979. However it appears not everyone is running into this problem. It is possible a change in the update exposed problems in other in box drivers or other 3rd party drivers.

It would help if you exposed the hardware you encountered this issue on.

IE: I'm finding this on SP1 (beta) and RTM with kb938979 (x86) on my secondary HD which is connected through a eSATA controller (Promise SATA Console SCSI Processor - Promise SATA300 TX2plus IDE Controller).

You can find you controller model by opening devmgmt.msc and viewing the devices by connection.

This problem occurs with power management set to "Never" turn HD off. You can find this in the advanced settings.

I installed the performance updates right when they came out and this problem started just a few days ago. Tonight, one or more of my drives started spinning up and down every 10-15 seconds!

I had always had my HDD power settings set to 'never'. I just checked it and it was set to 3000 minutes! I changed it back to 'never' and I hope that solves my problem.

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