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Storage Hard Drive Spinning Down

Discussion in 'Hardware' started by sleepygamer, 5 Jul 2010.

  1. sleepygamer

    sleepygamer More Metal Than Thou

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    This isn't so much of a problem, as it is a little niggle.

    I recently installed an SSD, and left my old hard drive installed with XP on it, as there are a few files I need to use and back up, as well as all my music.

    The niggle occurs when I don't access the drive for a while. There's the distinctive, heart-stopping click and descending whirr of the drive spinning down. A sound I most associate with the fairly frequent bluescreens of the old XP install.

    Is this normal? Is there any way to stop the drive spinning down? I don't really have the option of keeping my music on the SSD, as Win 7 and Steam are taking up most of the 64GB.

    As I'm going to be replacing that drive with a shiny new storage drive soon, will the new one do this too? o_O

    I've never used a multi-drive system before now, so I'm a little bit blindly wandering about right now.
     
  2. Bloody_Pete

    Bloody_Pete Technophile

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    I believe its just the power saving features, as now the drive it idling it just powers down. It shouldn't cause any issues I'd have thought. The new drive will probably do it too.
     
  3. sleepygamer

    sleepygamer More Metal Than Thou

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    I thought it would be something like that. Still, the sound is the sound of nightmares. Of great big glowing blue backgrounds with white texts spraying memory dump notices at me.

    I honestly jump when I hear it. That sound is so intricately linked to the breaking of immersion from a game, that a physical reaction has become present.

    Or maybe I'm just jumpy these past few days.
     
  4. Xonar

    Xonar What's a Dremel?

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    If it bothers you a lot you can disable it under the energy saving features section of windows 7, I did the same as I hated having to wait a few seconds for it to spin up every time i wanted to access something from it.
     
  5. Omnituens

    Omnituens What's a Dremel?

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    You can turn off that in W7 - I turned it off on my media drives as it was causing my laptop to stop responding when I tried to access them for it.
     
  6. Bloody_Pete

    Bloody_Pete Technophile

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    For me its a happy sound, as I have 3 F1's in RAID 5 so when me system shuts down each turns off one after the other. Theres something cool about it...

    Anyway, its grinding noises you want to be fearful of...
     
  7. sleepygamer

    sleepygamer More Metal Than Thou

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    Whelp. Disabled it for now. I hope. >.> Thanks for the info.

    This is quite an old drive (the Windows XP says that it has been installed for 4 years, and I think it was in use before that) and apart from standard access noises, and the shutdown click, it's pretty healthy.

    ...well it is very slow, and has partitions all over the place. To be honest, I should reformat it at some point, but I don't have anywhere to store the data in the meanwhile! :p
     

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