I have renewed by Home Treater PC to an Acer AX3400. I have Win7 64bit installed on a small SSD and other two drives as storage, same drives that were in my previous build. The problem that I have is that the drives won't spin down or turn off regardless of the settings I have in my power plan (currently 10 minutes) After a while they run hot..as they run all the time. I don't have any antivirus installed, windows defender service and windows indexer/search services are also disabled. There is no program in msconfig Startup. I can't detect what makes them ignore the power settings. My BIOS ATA controller is set to AHCI. In the other computer that I had, the spin down worked flawlessly using the same drives. it looks like there's an issue with this model. How can I see what keeps my hard drives from going idle and turn off?
hard drives are always going to spin unless your computer either turns off, goes into sleep mode, or hibernates. If a hard drive is not spinning when your computer is on, then that means the drive is dead. Although when they are idling they speed at a much lower speed than when you are read/writing on the drive. Are they running at full speed all the time?
Hi DemonX09, not always. hard drives will turn off in any operating system if you have power settings that enables that. like I said, it worked fine in my previous build, but not in this case as they won't spin down after the 15minutes idle timer. I'm talking about:
do you have any background programs running on the hard disk preventing it from idling, sometimes a program could be running in the background and is accessing cache on the hard drives and keeping them in a powered state.
I never actually went into my hard drive power settings before since I never felt the need to. I always have a fan blowing on my hard drives at all times. Hmm...well I learned something today lol.
Although, unless you have your hard drives in a case without any ventilation, they shouldn't be overheating when they idle, because when you aren't writing or reading from them they should slow down, and if they are overheating at a low RPM state you have bigger issues.
Update: setting the SATA operation in the BIOS to IDE made the drives spin off at the desired time. However, when using AHCI the drives refuse to go to sleep. I've put the drives back into the old computer and that one was by default set on AHCI and the drives do turn off. It looks like this nForce chipset that's in the Acer, when set to AHCI doesn't work properly. I have set them up in IDE for now, but I'll have to investigate what's up with the AHCI stuff.
