My hard drive keeps spinning down! (1 Viewer)

[damaster]

I added a 1TB Samsung SpinPoint HD103UJ secondary hard drive to my HTPC and moved all "My Video" shares to it. The problem is, when the drive is not in use, it spins down and takes a few seconds to spin back up and thus causes delays in starting up movie playback. I also tried moving my page file to that drive, but the system started messing up because of the drive spinning down.

I tried to use the Samsung ESTool to set the AAM to disable or to high performance, but the change doesn't take effect.

For now I've written a program that writes to a file every 8 minutes to keep the drive from spinning down. It works most of the time, but I still get the spin down delay issue after a few hours.

Any ideas?

 

[geov]

Just an idea, but have you looked at changing your power-profile in Vista....it could be Vista doing it?

 

[damaster]

Just an idea, but have you looked at changing your power-profile in Vista....it could be Vista doing it?

Yup, I've got it set to a custom profile which never spins down my hard drives. In fact, my primary Western Digital Caviar 500GB hard drive never spins down (also because it doesn't have AAM). This issue I'm experiencing is only with the Samsung SpinPoint and is a result of it's built-in AAM! I'm hoping someone else has solved this for the same or similar drive.

 

[nachttier]

Hi,

as far as i know AAM has nothing to do with with power saving or making the drive to spin down. It is just for improving the drive's acoustics (see Automatic Acoustic Management - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia).
I would suggest to double check the power profile of vista, since I think vista takes full control of the power management. It also might be that the motherboard's BIOS has some power saving feature, so checking the settings there might also be worth it, although I doubt that the BIOS can overwrite Vista's settings.

Kind regards,
nachttier

 

[damaster]

I've double and triple checked the power profile in Vista and it is definitely set to never spin down my hard drives. And as I mentioned before, my primary hard drive (a Western Digital) never spins down even when left idle for days. This problem only happens with the Samsung SpinPoint!

 

[djhopps]

I've double and triple checked the power profile in Vista and it is definitely set to never spin down my hard drives. And as I mentioned before, my primary hard drive (a Western Digital) never spins down even when left idle for days. This problem only happens with the Samsung SpinPoint!

I have exactly the same problem with my Samsung spinpoint!! well annoying!! I've no idea what's causing it, once it's up and running again it's fine.... all power mgt features of vista are turned off!

 

[damaster]

I've double and triple checked the power profile in Vista and it is definitely set to never spin down my hard drives. And as I mentioned before, my primary hard drive (a Western Digital) never spins down even when left idle for days. This problem only happens with the Samsung SpinPoint!

I have exactly the same problem with my Samsung spinpoint!! well annoying!! I've no idea what's causing it, once it's up and running again it's fine.... all power mgt features of vista are turned off!

Turns out my problem was indeed the Vista power management. I thought I had ensured it was set to never turn off the hard disks but it was actually set to turn off hard disks after 20 minutes. Once I changed that setting, my Samsung 1TB SpinPoint stopped exhibiting this problem. I've since moved my pagefile to that secondary disk and my system has never been faster.

 

[djhopps]

Aha.... grand. I will double check my settings. Cheers, Dave