Vista Shuts Off Hard Drives??

[Kunaak]

after about 10 minutes or so, my back up hard drives shut down.
now the drives have all been scanned recently (about a week ago) and all is fine as far as the drives themself goes.
I also havent had any problems with these drives on XP64, which I just replaced today for testing reasons, and use Vista 64 now...

however, now my back up hard drives are being shut down after a few minutes of no use.

I got so tired of trying to figure out whats going on, that I took a spare hard drive, set it up... booted up the OS, and waited for the "Click-Whirrr" sound that normally would happen when a hard drive and PC are shut down.

sure enough, even with my spare hard drive, it shuts the drive down after about 10 minutes.

so I've confirmed this happens with 3 different drives so far...

a 400 gig western digital, a 500 gig western digital, and 160 gig seagate.

all drives are fine, and work like normal under XP and such...
however in vista, it seems to be clock work. 10 minutes and it shuts down the back up drives.
I mean, physically click off.

try to access them, and they "whirrrrr" back on, as if the PC was booting them up, and about 5 seconds later, they become accessable.

what is this?
I've never seen this...

[NoSinder]

I think the same thing happens to me, cause when I boot up Vista, I always hear that, but now that I've booted up XP and been using that lately, I don't notice anymore. I thought my drives were bad, but it seems perfectly fine now. That's weird....

[Reznik Akime]

Check your power saving settings. If thats not the issue, then ya got me.

[mnewxcv]

Check your power saving settings. If thats not the issue, then ya got me.

ftw...

[Pyr0]

dodgy nvidia drivers?
i know if i use the "mediashield" sata drivers from the official 15.00 set (v9.31), my drives spin down no matter how the power options in vista are set.
those drivers also add an extra 20 seconds or so to my boot time because the drives spin up and down before vista reboots and then seem to take longer to spin back up again as the pc posts

[Okda]

AFAIK it is a new option M$ thought that it will be useful for users to shutdown their hdds after being idle for sometime, which was one of the main factors why i went back to XP

[Avman]

AFAIK it is a new option M$ thought that it will be useful for users to shutdown their hdds after being idle for sometime, which was one of the main factors why i went back to XP

why not just turn it off? Vista lets you change the power profile and change nearly every setting within each profile. Why not just tell it not to turn off the drives?

[big poppa pump]

As mentioned in some of the above posts, go into advanced power settings and disable hdd standy mode.

[Nikolasz]

My test vista's kill one of my 20 Gb :d

[Pyr0]

As mentioned in some of the above posts, go into advanced power settings and disable hdd standy mode.

as mentioned above, changing the option made no difference on my 680i

[Budwise]

changing the option in advanced power settings fixed it for me. I posted about this a while back when i had the problem and also posted the solution...

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=123731

[mnewxcv]

kunaak, i must admit im surprised by you! lol

[Kunaak]

kunaak, i must admit im surprised by you! lol

why?

I havent seen anything in vista yet about having to send my hard drives to sleep... and its not a feature I've ever seen in XP...
my time with vista is literally about 10 days total before I got sick of it last time. so my experience with it is very limited, and my experience with XP I've just never had this issue, so I dont even know if XP has this feature, never looked for it, never will... cause it's not something I will ever want to use.

if my computers on, I want my hard drives to be on.
hearing them clicking on and off, just makes me paranoid of increasing it's likelyhood of failure.
its probably psychological, but I just dont like hearing my hard drives randomly clicking on an off. if my PC is turned on, I want the hard drives on, plain as that.

so I found the settling and disabled it, hopefully this does the trick.

[mnewxcv]

yeah its a feature in xp, but it isnt enabled by default. im not sure why someone would choose this instead of standby or something? I personally only use turn monitor off after 5min. hope that solves your problem for ya, good luck with vista.

[TuKo]

I'm too surprised about Kunaak :)

It'd be interesting to know if a functionnality like this implemented now by default in Vista has results on world power saving.

[Anemone]

It's an XP feature too. Just turn it off if you don't want it. Hell you can set up an entire water cooling system over a course of days, but 2 min to go to a screen and turn off a feature and the world comes to an end?

Having had laptops and desktops I'm always tweaking the power saving. I just set it for a very long time, but in case we happen to go out of the house and I forgot to turn things off, they go off by themselves unless they are supposed to be on 24/7.

With the whole energy star program I'd bet a lot of manufacturers of everything, software and hardware are under the gun to make energy saving the default.

[Kunaak]

It's an XP feature too. Just turn it off if you don't want it. Hell you can set up an entire water cooling system over a course of days, but 2 min to go to a screen and turn off a feature and the world comes to an end?
.


is there some reason why you feel the need to be insulting, or do you just not happen to read my posts before making comments?

how many ways do I have to say... "I've never seen this feature before" before you actually listen?

incase, you dont actually read my previous posts, before trying to insult me...
read this, since, its basically the same thing I said a week ago.

I've never seen this feature before, never needed it, never saw it.
I didnt even know such a feature existed till I started messing with vista again.

seems you should have known that, had you read my posts before this one...

[serialk11r]

Hmmm... I set my hard drive to shut off after 10 minutes (I have XP) but Vista does it automatically? Wow that's disturbing/surprising...

[Z3R0-CooL]

give this guy a break ffs . You cant possibly expect a single person to know absolutely everything. He proly knows more about other stuff that you do, and what you find complicated he finds easy.

Kunaak i had the same problem in XP, everytime i restarted, the HDDs would switch off and it would take sometime to turn them back on during POST. I never figured out what it was, and no guys, it wasnt the power options.... After i reinstalled OS it disappeared without me doing anything..

so if the power configs do not work then it might be a bug in the OS or maybe BIOS.

[Growly]

give this guy a break ffs QFT.

Knowledge is fluid, it changes, it moves, and it doesn't apply to everything, and most importantly it comes from experience. If you expect someone to know everything about something they've never seen before "just because", then you haven't been around computers for very long :p Give him time, he'll be so pro at Vista even Mac users will ask for help.

Slightly on topic, I actually turned this feature on with my Raptors in Server 2K3 the other day. The problem was that the hard drives would turn off, then disappear from My Computer, and not turn back on again, ever.

[Kobalt]

Isn't the constant starting and shutting down of hard drives bad for the drive?

[Nanometer]

Turning any component off and off slowly kills it.