Do hard drives spin constantly & HDD heat?

I

Icewindius

Gawd
Joined
Sep 30, 2003
Messages
802
Unless you tell your computer otherwise, your HDD spin no matter what.

ALot of people don't like the feature of turning of the HDD's. Not only is this extra wear and tear on the HDD's have to spin them back up to speed, but also i've seen cases where HDD' that spin down and you try to wake the computer back up, sometimes the computer freaks to the point it restarts.

I"ve seen it at work, it usually happens with hibernation mode, where the data is taken out of the RAM, shut down and then the HDD Is shut down as well. If for whatever reason the data is not loaded correctly, the system crashes and it usually results in lost data and corrupted file system files.


In otherwords, if your gonna be gone for awhile, turn the machine off completely. Otherwise, let your HDD"s spin, thats what they were meant to do.
 
Elaboration

SCSI drives are "tested" to be spinning constantly and are generally expected to be.

IDE Drives (which I assume your are even with the Firewire interface) are consumer HDDs where power on\off cycles are expected.

Are SCSI Drives more reliable? @ SRFAQ


I'll just cut and apste this one, follow link for embedded links
Poor SCSI performance when using WinXP, or Win2k with SP3 or later
"To cut a long story short, in WinXP MS corrected a bug in Win2k that caused requests to bypass write caching to be ignored. This bug could have caused possible data loss (if the data hadn't been written to the drive and the power went out for example).

Unfortunately the correction of this bug also affects Windows Explorer. In many circumstances, when using SCSI drives, file copies aren't cached, and performance is extremely slow when compared to pre SP3 Win2k. Win2k SP3 and SP4 also have the XP 'problem'.

There is a Microsoft article that goes in to some depth here (cache).

There are a number of 'solutions' depending on your situation.

For Windows 2000, MS released a two part solution. First, a patch is installed to provide what is essentially a 'ignore bypass write caching requests' function. (Note: this patch is included in Win2k SP4). A tool called 'dskcache' is then used to switch on this option on a per-disk level. More on this available here (cache).

For Windows XP, it is rumoured that MS will provide a solution in SP2. Until then, there is a possible solution created by cas, an SR forum member. It is a program called xpcachefilter, which, when installed, filters out the bypass write cache requests on ALL drives. Note that as IDE drives don't support the command to begin with, it has no effect on them. More on this here (cache). It can be downloaded here (cache). Use it at your own risk.

For Windows 2003 Server, under Device Manager->*select drive*->Right click->Properties->Policies tab there is a setting to "enable write caching on the disk", and a further option to "Enable advanced performance". This last option reverts to the behaviour of ignoring bypass write caching requests.

For now, Windows 2003 Server or Windows 2000 SP2 is the best option for SCSI drive users who feel that they need the lost write performance back. Remember though, it only affects applications and benchmarks that request bypassing of the write cache. As mentioned above, this includes the Windows file copy function from Explorer."

One thing that could be making the externals constantly spin and be access is Indexing, to turn that off
indexing


To Enable \ Disable Write Cache for a specific drive
Windows Explorer > RClick the target drive > Properties > Hardware Tab > Properties > Disk Properties > Check or Uncheck

Also look if there is any scheduled tasks that Might be accessing the disks.
Start > Programs >Accesories > System Tools
 
To the post above me, not true. A HDD can get power but it can get a shutdown command and it will spin down but still technically be powered on, just the motor is not running. This allows it to save power when not needed but be commanded to spin back up.
 
Wow I didn't even notice, good thing I wasn't the "bumpee".

Mods, maybe you should lock this?
 
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