When I created one image of the two screenshots in my previous comment, it became obvious that the hard drive still spins down after 5-10 seconds. Because GIMP (a program like Photoshop) is stored on the HDD, and when the hard drive accelerates, it's very easy to hear that; it's a characteristic sound. The reason why I installed it on D is that C is relatively small. I use this computer for music production, and the plan was to store all audio (mostly recordings made with microphone) on the large HDD, and only what is absolutely necessary on C (and that's a lot).

So: Does anybody know of a method so I can have my hard drive turning for 30 minutes? And can we be sure that no damage has occurred when I used the command prompt twice?

P.S. Am I not supposed to ask questions about the Nitro model here? In that case: where?

I bought this computer recently, second hand. It was originally manufactured in June 2017 (Acer Nitro AN515-51). It has always had two discs, and still has: One SSD, C: (128 GB) and one HDD, D : (1 TB). There is no doubt whatsoever about this.

I made a clean install, of course, of Windows 10 Home, where I checked the boxes for delete everything old on the two discs. And W10 is now installed on C (I guess everything else is impossible). Open Office, for example, is installed on D, and that works perfectly well (I have it on D in order not to waste any space on the relatively small C). Gimp (a program like Photoshop) is also installed on D, and it is possible to use it. But it is very annoying when it kind of freezes every now and then due to the fact that hdd still spins down after 5-10 seconds.

What's even more frustrating is that it seems I'm not going to be able to use this computer for music production. I have installed my DAW (REAPER) on C (the only natural thing to do). So called plugins, which I have plenty of, are also installed on C (these kind of things has to be handled quick). But when it comes to so called audio (mostly recordings made with microphone, but also samples (for examples one thousand samples from a grand piano)), I must use D for this, because there is simply not room enough on C. And in theory this is supposed to cause no problems (the fact that things are stored on different discs). But one thing is required, though: that the hard drive does not stop spinning after five seconds. (In fact it is possible to create music despite of this, but it requires a lot of (/too much) patience.)

The hard drive is a Western Digital WD10SPZX-21Z10T0 - 1TB 5.4K RPM SATA 7mm 2.5". It's SATA. Could it be that this specific model will continue to spin down rapidly whatever methods you try to use to prevent it from doing so?

What I wasn't sure of, before, was if C is always 'a' and D is always 'b'. But I think I understand now, that that's the case. Anyway, the command: hdparm -S 241 /dev/sdb did not solve the problem, although the “answer” I got from cmd was that "this unit" should be active for 30 minutes.

Thanks for your kind answer, JackE    P.S. The reason why I asked the same question again, was that I discovered that this part of the forum seems to be meant only for Aspire, whereas there is another part for Nitro. So I thought my question in the Nitro-part would be published immediately, and then I had planned to immediately delete this post. But the Nitro-question never was approved.

Thanks. I just downloaded and extracted the tar.gz file. It contains six different files. This is a little bit beyond my knowledge and skills. For example, the compilation and installation instructions uses the dollar sign. I have no idea if I'm supposed to use that sing on a windows machine (and what to do with the six files). Maybe if I read the instructions over and over again and use Google, a little.

On the other hand I have decided not to rush. After all it's possible to use this laptop as is, and there is still plenty of space on the C-disc. But I will try to solve this!

I did contact the manufacturer, BTW, Western Digital, and asked in an email if they have a solution. They haven't answered yet (and I'm not sure that they will).

Cheers

/per99

I tried to run APMTimer from cmd, but it seems it is not possible (?) I typed (when I was in the right directory): apmtimer -g /dev/sdb in order to get information about the present spindown time. But the answer I got back from cmd was: 'apmtimer' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file.

The guy who wrote the steps on the site I have already given a link to, suggests using Ubuntu. But I haven't downloaded Ubuntu (yet). And one reason is that I have already installed Python for Windows. (I did that a month ago when I was creating wavetables.) Could there be a conflict?

And also, I'm not familiar with Ubuntu commands. But here are the steps: