HDD power down during idle

Soldato
Joined
3 Jan 2006
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5,009
So I've recently re-installed vista with the hard drives set to AHCI in BIOS because I heard that AHCI is natively supported by Vista which gives me NCQ, hot-plug, sequential starts..etc that are lacking if the SATA drives are set to emulate IDE.

However now that occasionally I'll hear a click from my HDD, and it appears to be HDD shutting itself down during idle. Now this is quite annoying because games will now occasionally freeze for a few seconds waiting for the HDDs to wake up again, I know it's the HDD because the HDD activity light is constantly on during freeze and goes off again when games continue.

Now is there a way to adjust the settings without setting the SATA interface type option in BIOS back to IDE? I went into the Intel Matrix Storage Manager but it doesn't give you any option.
 
The Vista power options will be default spin disks down after 20mins of inactivity. Te setting is a bit buried unfortunately - you need to edit the advanced options of the power scheme you're currently using.
 
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