How to keep nVidia RAID drives from spinning up and down?

[Stacey Melissa]

My PC has three 250GB Hitachi T7K250 SATA drives. One is used as the boot disk, and the other two are in RAID 0 via an nForce 430 southbridge. The array is only used for storing my ripped DVD collection, which is only accessed when I'm viewing movies in Media Center.

The problem is that Windows XP is apparently not very bright when it comes to knowing when disks need to be spinning. The array spins down after 5 or 10 minutes of inactivity, and I haven't found a way to keep it from doing that. That would not be a problem, except that Windows seems to think it needs the array spinning whenever I start any application, regardless of whether the application actually uses data on the array. So say I want to check my email. I click on the email program icon, and then wait ten seconds for the array to spin up before the email program can load. Five or ten minutes later, the array spins down, and I have to go through the same thing again if I want to start iTunes.

Naturally, the first thing I thought of was to disable the spindown timeout option in the Power Options control panel. Didn't work. Then I checked BIOS for any applicable power management options. Nothing in there. My latest effort was to put the swap file on the array. But I've got 2GB of RAM, so the swap file hardly ever gets accessed. I even tried setting the drives to "Performance Mode" (which is supposed to keep the drives from saving power) using Hitachi's Feature Tool. Still no go.

Now, if I could just keep the array from unnecessarily spinning up with each and every loading application, I'd be happy. But if I can't do that, I'd like to keep the array spinning all the time. The idle noise doesn't bother me, although the spinup noise and delay are quite annoying. Anyone have any ideas?