V3 772g 2nd Hard Disk Powering Down

Shenya
Shenya Member Posts: 27 Enthusiast WiFi Icon
in 2016 Archives

After installing an mSATA SSD (which became Disk 0) alongside the existing SATA HDD (which became Disk 1) and clean installing Windows 10 I am experiencing a really annoying issue.

 

The 2nd HDD being 1TB vs the 120GB SSD I installed, is where I will be keeping all my games etc. I hear the HDD spin down after just a few seconds, and everytime I need to get something off of it, have to wait a moment for it to spin up before I can open files or folders. This wouldn't be a huge deal, but even in the middle of games, if they are not accessing the drive constantly, it falls asleep, and when they do need to pull in some more data, the game ends up griding to a halt waiting on the drive to spin up so it can load the next section. This is absolutely game breaking!

 

I have set the hard drive to never turn off in advanced power management, but it seems this only affects the system disk. When I boot into Windows 8, it works perfectly without ever powering down, I'm guessing since it's the system disk. I also tried turning off the USB suspend stuff, just on the off chance. It seems completely independent of the power settings, after all, even if it were set to turn off after 10 minutes, it'd never be an issue whilst gaming. It's shutting off after just seconds of having been used. I can open up my pictures, and if I want to look at more than 1, I have to be pretty fast to move to the next one otherwise it's gone beddybyes again.

 

How do I stop it powering down without using a ridiculous tool to constantly write a blank file to it?

Best Answer

  • sharky25k
    sharky25k Member Posts: 473 Skilled Practitioner WiFi Icon
    Answer ✓

    Hi,

     

    It's a feature which saves power on the notebook. It's called advanced power management for the HDD.

     

    You can read more about this on the internet of course.

    You can use hdparam to set the value in order to avoid spindown or to spindown after a longer time.

     

    http://disablehddapm.blogspot.com/p/1.html

     

    More info about APM  briefly of course:

    http://disablehddapm.blogspot.com/

     

    You can search the internet for even more information about APM.

    Just a note. I think that windows set the APM to 80 on the second HDD which would mean to spindown after 30 seconds of inactivity. It's a method to save battery life. It sets this setting in the hdd firmware, and even if you change it once, it will still set the same value after restart, so the software above needs to run at each startup.

     

     

     

Answers

  • sharky25k
    sharky25k Member Posts: 473 Skilled Practitioner WiFi Icon
    Answer ✓

    Hi,

     

    It's a feature which saves power on the notebook. It's called advanced power management for the HDD.

     

    You can read more about this on the internet of course.

    You can use hdparam to set the value in order to avoid spindown or to spindown after a longer time.

     

    http://disablehddapm.blogspot.com/p/1.html

     

    More info about APM  briefly of course:

    http://disablehddapm.blogspot.com/

     

    You can search the internet for even more information about APM.

    Just a note. I think that windows set the APM to 80 on the second HDD which would mean to spindown after 30 seconds of inactivity. It's a method to save battery life. It sets this setting in the hdd firmware, and even if you change it once, it will still set the same value after restart, so the software above needs to run at each startup.

     

     

     

  • Shenya
    Shenya Member Posts: 27 Enthusiast WiFi Icon

    Thanks again Sharky!

     

    It's annoying that it only does this when the HDD is not the system drive. I never ever heard it power down when it was the only connected drive in Windows 8, and even as it becomes the 2nd drive after installing the mSATA SSD, it doesn't exhibit this behavior when running Windows 8, only when I'm in Windows 10 where it is no longer the system drive. I timed it btw, exactly 20 seconds after an access, it'll power down. I would think since so much of the computers power management can be changed in the power profile in windows (from stopping wifi devices using power saving and preventing USB idle devices turning off) that selecting NEVER for hard disks turning off (when connected to the mains, I NEVER use this machine on battery anyway!) would apply to all hard disks, and if not, would expect a setting for each one connected. Madness.

     

    Interestingly I have discovered another way of stopping this annoying behavior. Keeping HWMonitor running (I use this occasionally to check CPU temps) prevents the drive from spinning down, I'm assuming since it's polling for temperature and usage information so often.

     

    The APM article was interesting, I just wonder why this behavior only exhibits when in Windows 10 and why it never one time powered itself down under Windows 8, either when it was the sole HDD or now that its become the second. Perhaps the Windows power management only affects the system drive and overrides the drives built in APM? I never one time experienced this issue on multiple SSD/HDD systems I built over the years and only encountered it since adding an SSD to this laptop and running Win 10 on the SSD.

  • sharky25k
    sharky25k Member Posts: 473 Skilled Practitioner WiFi Icon

    Hi,

     

    Of course the APM is not set to 80 in the case of the first HDD. It's set to 255 (APM disabled) since, if you would set the APM to 80 on the main HDD your system would be very choppy. It happens on the second HDD and I think is the same also on the w8 systems. Keeping any software which accesses the HDD often will prevent spin down, since if for example you have the setting at 80, which means spin down after 30 seconds of inactivity, the timer is reset each time when the HDD is accessed by a software.

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