Hard drives wont stay spun down

AussieHusky · Post by **AussieHusky** » Sun Oct 14, 2007 5:37 am

Hi all, I have a gigabyte Ds2R mobo and 5 Hard drives, all of which are quite loud, they all are set to spin down, I can hear them spin down, the comp is completely silent, But then after about a minute they all spin up again, one by one, all in successive order one immediately after the other.

I am running Vista but the same thing used to happen under XP, I have disabled drive indexing completely, I even tried changing the security permissions on the non system drives so that only my user account could access the hard drives but it still seems to happen, its like the system is checking they are still there. They are all Sata drives and the mobo is in ACHI mode, its very odd though because they dont appear under the "Safetly remove" icon, and under the "optimize for performance, optimize for quick removal" screen optimize for quick removal is greyed out. Any ideas?.

StApostol · Post by **StApostol** » Sun Oct 14, 2007 6:08 am

They are all Sata drives and the mobo is in ACHI mode, its very odd though because they dont appear under the "Safetly remove" icon, and under the "optimize for performance, optimize for quick removal" screen optimize for quick removal is greyed out. Any ideas?.

Updating the storage drivers might help here (search for intel storage manager).

I don't think it is possible to stop disk drives from spinning up under Windows - this is an OS issue. I've heard that Linux behaves better in this regard.

AussieHusky · Post by **AussieHusky** » Sun Oct 14, 2007 6:58 am

I have all the latest drivers, I thought it might fix it if I put it in RAID mode instead of AHCI but windows bluescreens every time I boot with raid mode on in the bios.

jaganath · Post by **jaganath** » Sun Oct 14, 2007 7:40 am

hdparm windows port! stopping,AAM,APM etc

Das_Saunamies · Post by **Das_Saunamies** » Mon Oct 15, 2007 12:09 am

I used to have drives spin up because my AV would want to check on them from time to time(waaay back, behaves better now). Same thing happened when I made shortcuts on my desktop and quick launch that pointed to the drives that needed to shut up: Windows apparently checked the shortcuts every time my desktop loaded. Not sure if my defragmentation utility had anything to do with it, but I disabled it along with indexing and a few other things.

So check AV, defrag and shortcuts, just to be safe. I now have 0 shortcuts pointing outside my sys drive and all is wonderful. Drives never spin up unless I access them myself.

I'm running XP Pro 32bit, latest updates and .NET installed. AV is F-Secure Client Security, defrag is Perfectdisk 8.
--

Here's the HDD tweak file I cobbled together and run whenever I install a fresh XP, try googling the tweaks to see what they do:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem]
"NtfsDisableLastAccessUpdate"=dword:00000001

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management]
"DisablePagingExecutive"=dword:00000001

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer]
"NoLowDiskSpaceChecks"=dword:00000001

highlandsun · Post by **highlandsun** » Mon Oct 15, 2007 12:55 am

You also need to disable the Task Scheduler, since that wakes up periodically and looks for scheduled tasks to fire off. There's a lot of stupid Windows background services that will wake up the disk, and some just can't be turned off.

Das_Saunamies · Post by **Das_Saunamies** » Mon Oct 15, 2007 9:05 am

I thought getting rid of Task Scheduler was mandatory for any self-respecting PC owner.

If you're just entering the laborous duty that is service killing, here are some prime candidates:
- Alerter
- Anything by Apple
- ClipBook
- Error Reporting Service
- Machine Debug Manager
- Messenger
- Anything Remote Desktop(unless you really need it)
- Performance Logs and Alerts
- Portable Media Serial Number Service
- Remote Registry
- NetBios helper
- Telnet
- Terminal services(leave these two if you need them)
- UPnP, all of it
- UPS management

That about covers it. Then there are services you could just set to manual so they launch when you need them, not every time the system wants to choke itself.

Also, what sort of programs do you run in the background besides AV and some such?

MoJo · Post by **MoJo** » Tue Oct 16, 2007 10:10 am

It's really, really hard to keep the drives spun down in Windows, in any useful way. The slightest access will wake them up again. So far, AFAIK no-one has found a satisfactory solution to this.

Nick Geraedts · Post by **Nick Geraedts** » Tue Oct 16, 2007 12:08 pm

highlandsun wrote:You also need to disable the Task Scheduler, since that wakes up periodically and looks for scheduled tasks to fire off.

Das_Saunamies wrote:I thought getting rid of Task Scheduler was mandatory for any self-respecting PC owner.

Disabling the Task Scheduler is a bad, bad idea. Without the task scheduler, you lose all prefetch ability built into WindowsXP, which, dispite whatever tweaking sites you might have visited, actually improves the performance of your system.

Das_Saunamies · Post by **Das_Saunamies** » Tue Oct 16, 2007 10:02 pm

Prefetching does improve the boot times as it lets Windows create a cache for the necessary files.

I boot in under 15 seconds from start to login to working desktop anyway. Programs launch seamlessly. Why would I need it?

The articles below are very informative, but don't seem to fully apply to what I'm experiencing. I'd rather have drives spun down than a marginal improvement to what is alredy performing well enough.

http://mywebpages.comcast.net/SupportCD/XPMyths.html
http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issue ... /XPKernel/

MoJo · Post by **MoJo** » Sun Nov 25, 2007 4:02 pm

I found a way to keep HDDs spun down, but at the cost of some convenience.

The trick is to make sure there are no mounted volumes on the HDD. You could use scripts to mount/unmount the volumes, or use TrueCrypt and gain transparent encryption too.

Drives with no mounted partitions generally seem to stay spun down. I have a script that mounts a TrueCrypt partition, runs a backup and then dismounts it again.

Isochroma · Post by **Isochroma** » Sun Nov 25, 2007 4:06 pm

Indeed you are correct; having no mounted volumes on a drive guarantees (providing Windows is set to spin drives down, and the controller supports it) spindown.

However, just not having any processes accessing any volumes on a disk will also guarantee Windows spins it down, again provided the controller supports spindown and Windows Power Options are set to make it so.

And if the controller doesn't support spindown, even wiping the partitions won't make it stop running.

MoJo · Post by **MoJo** » Sun Nov 25, 2007 4:48 pm

Isochroma, if you read the thread you will see that a lot of people have problems, even when not running any programs. It seems that Windows checks the drives periodically itself.

Before you ask, yes we tried disabling the Indexing Service, automatic defrag, even automatic updates, shell hardware detection etc.

I think even minor things can cause a mounted volume to be accessed, like opening My Computer or a program checking available disk space or mounted drive letters. You certainly can't use the system as a file server, or run something like uTorrent because it will keep waking the drives up.

Dismounting is the only solution currently.

Isochroma · Post by **Isochroma** » Sun Nov 25, 2007 5:14 pm

I can only speak from my personal experience; my drives stay spun down unless I access them, on an individual basis.

However, I've shut down lots of services and disabled lots of crap in Windows; an untweaked installation would be less likely to spin down drives.

As you say, dismounting works, but only if the controller supports spindown.

Many people have only their boot drive, so for them I can only extend my pity; the boot drive usually never spins down due to Windows constant usage.

If you can get spindown happening once, you'll know your controller supports it. Then it will be a matter of using Filemon to determine which software is accessing the drive. You will then be able to extract maximum spindown from your machine.

Thomas · Post by **Thomas** » Mon Nov 26, 2007 7:45 am

Interesting and usefull thread, thanks.

While Windows seems pretty stupid in this regard, it fortunately dont spin up optical drives once in a while. Which makes me think: Is there a way to make Windows think, that a harddisk is an optical drive?

I mean, Daemon Tool can make Windows believe that an CD-ROM image file on a harddisk, is an CD-ROM inserted in an optical drive...

Can someone please provide a link or info about how I dismount a drive? Prefeable from a DOS box, so I can make some scripts...

Thanks,
Thomas

MoJo · Post by **MoJo** » Mon Nov 26, 2007 12:16 pm

One other method that seems to work somewhat reliably is to mount volumes as directories, rather than drive letters. Don't use a directory in the root of a drive.

As you noticed Thomas, Windows seems to cache data about optical drives more aggressively than HDDs. Presumably it was designed that way, not considering that people might want their HDDs to spin down.

Thomas · Post by **Thomas** » Tue Nov 27, 2007 3:10 am

I suppose you speak about FSUTIL and MOUNTVOL?

The phrase "seems to work somewhat reliably" makes me suspious; In which manner do you mean? That Windows sometimes spin up the drive, or that the mount dissappears, or, far more worse, data losses?

aztec · Post by **aztec** » Tue Nov 27, 2007 3:53 am

Indexing in Vista should wake up the drive everytime a file is indexed...right?

Thomas · Post by **Thomas** » Tue Nov 27, 2007 4:45 am

MoJo wrote:As you noticed Thomas, Windows seems to cache data about optical drives more aggressively than HDDs. Presumably it was designed that way, not considering that people might want their HDDs to spin down.

I dont think Windows cache much data about ODD - when I dont have a disk in my ODD, Windows opens the drive overview through "My computer" faster, than if I have a disk in there...

I believe Windows handle ODD's in a different way; That is, Windows dont check for free space, try indexing etc., on ODD's.

MoJo · Post by **MoJo** » Tue Nov 27, 2007 6:23 am

Having a volume mounted to a directory generally allows it to stay spun down most of the time, but occasionally it will spin up when it really shouldn't for some reason. There is no data loss etc.

In Vista you can disable indexing on a per volume basis, just like XP. I wonder if Vista is clever enough not to try and index spun down drives?

jojo4u · Post by **jojo4u** » Tue Nov 27, 2007 6:46 am

For those who experience spin-ups, you might want to check sysinternal's Process Monitor and Disk Monitor.