Turning HDD off in Windows 7 not working

Silencing hard drives, optical drives and other storage devices

Moderators: NeilBlanchard, Ralf Hutter, sthayashi, Lawrence Lee

Post Reply
widowmaker
Posts: 239
Joined: Sat Mar 29, 2008 7:05 pm
Location: Toronto Ontario

Turning HDD off in Windows 7 not working

Post by widowmaker » Sun Sep 05, 2010 2:20 pm

Greetings,

I'm currently using an ssd for my primary drive and a 500gb hdd for storage. I recently installed Windows 7 and changed the power plan settings to turn my hdd off after 10 minutes. This however is not working. I have used the resource monitor under the task manager to watch for disk activity on that hdd but there is none in the 10 minutes that it idles. Does anyone know if there are certain services that need to be enabled or running in order for this power management to work? I couldn't find anything online about this so I thought I'd ask my fellow silent pc enthusiasts.

mkk
Posts: 687
Joined: Sun Sep 05, 2004 1:51 pm
Location: Gefle, Sweden
Contact:

Post by mkk » Sun Sep 05, 2010 3:56 pm

Storage interface drivers may interfere so try updating, but usually there's some program that sniffs at the drive a little now and then. For testing, set the limit to just one minute and see if it ever goes to sleep. If not then maybe it's the driver after all.

With typically half a dozen drives in my main system I've been hunting for a culprit application a number of times. Most recently it was just some config files of a program that resided on another drive. They weren't being accessed much but it seemed enough that the files were active for the drive not to fall asleep or wake up soon after if it did.

Lawrence Lee
SPCR Reviewer
Posts: 1115
Joined: Fri Mar 04, 2005 9:07 pm
Location: Vancouver

Post by Lawrence Lee » Sun Sep 05, 2010 4:46 pm

What programs do you have running?

fumino
Posts: 298
Joined: Thu Aug 05, 2010 4:38 pm
Location: ontario

Post by fumino » Sun Sep 05, 2010 7:07 pm

do you have the indexing service running?

widowmaker
Posts: 239
Joined: Sat Mar 29, 2008 7:05 pm
Location: Toronto Ontario

Post by widowmaker » Sun Sep 05, 2010 9:20 pm

I've updated windows and searched for new drivers but windows tells me it's up to date and Seagate doesn't have any drivers for download that I can find.

Indexing service by default is disabled in windows 7 but I double checked and it indeed is not running.

I have absolutely no programs running. I even disabled Avira antivirus and set the drive spin down time to 1 minute but still does not spin down. I also tried this in safe mode to make sure nothing else would be running and still that didn't fix it. I'm not sure if safe mode would have somehow disabled power management.

One minor thing that I noticed is that in the device manager my SATA drive is detected as "ST350041 8AS SCSI Disk Device". I don't believe this is the issue though.

I should also note that I'm running 2 Intel 80gb G2 SSDs in raid 0. I understand that windows 7 makes certain changes to accomodate SSDs. I'm wondering if this somehow interferes with the HDD from powering down. When I was on XP I could spin down this drive with no problems. Same hardware, just different OS.

This hard drive whirring is driving me insane! I appreciate everyone's help!

Eunos
Friend of SPCR
Posts: 378
Joined: Mon Dec 12, 2005 3:29 am
Location: Melbourne, Australia

Post by Eunos » Sun Sep 05, 2010 9:31 pm

widowmaker wrote:I understand that windows 7 makes certain changes to accomodate SSDs. I'm wondering if this somehow interferes with the HDD from powering down.
This is quite possible. Since using an X25-M, I notice that I am unable to open Disk Defragmenter on my Windows 7 computer even if I only want to defragment a platter drive.

I'm sure there'd be a way around it though...

mkk
Posts: 687
Joined: Sun Sep 05, 2004 1:51 pm
Location: Gefle, Sweden
Contact:

Post by mkk » Mon Sep 06, 2010 12:35 am

widowmaker wrote:I've updated windows and searched for new drivers but windows tells me it's up to date
Chances are that the storage controller isn't using its ideal driver and that's not something that Windows can check for. Look at either the website of the motherboard manufacturer or the maker of the chip set that the motherboard is based on. Sometimes a motherboard can have a secondary interface chip for a couple of extra SATA-ports as well.
I should also note that I'm running 2 Intel 80gb G2 SSDs in raid 0. I understand that windows 7 makes certain changes to accomodate SSDs. I'm wondering if this somehow interferes with the HDD from powering down.
Windows 7 won't do anything funny to this just because it detects one or more SSD's, but running the storage interface in RAID mode makes it extra important to have a good driver installed.

fumino
Posts: 298
Joined: Thu Aug 05, 2010 4:38 pm
Location: ontario

Post by fumino » Mon Sep 06, 2010 8:09 am

in the bios, check to see whether you're in ahci, or ide mode... pretty sure im in ahci

you can also try HDTune. my drives wouldnt spin down all the way when i had the aam set to high performance, instead of low noise.


hoping that you can get this worked out, i'm running an ssd for os, and 6 hdd's for storage... i know the pain of not having them spin down xD

widowmaker
Posts: 239
Joined: Sat Mar 29, 2008 7:05 pm
Location: Toronto Ontario

Post by widowmaker » Fri Sep 10, 2010 1:49 pm

Well, I never figured out what's wrong here. I guess my motherboard is just too old. I have an Asus M2N32 SLI motherboard and a 500gb seagate drive. I ended up getting a hard drive dock and putting my hdd in that whenever I need to access my storage. :?

Post Reply