HDD Spinning Down

Pulseammo

Pulseammo

Pulseammo

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Joined
10 Jan 2006
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1,497
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Scotland
Hello folks, I've got a machine here that seems to have a faulty hard drive. Every so often it sounds like one of the two hard drives inside it spins down and parks then spins up again. This causes the machine to hang, sometimes it recovers, sometimes it reboots.

The problem is intermittent, it seems to happen when I'm trying to install programs on the machine. Sometimes large file copies set it off. Eventually the problem gets worse and worse so that the hard drive parks right after windows boots. Eventually windows wont boot at all, requiring a format.

Now I can't figure out if this is a power issue with the system, or if one of the hard drives is faulty, there's nothing in the event logger in windows to tell me. I've run a straight 72 hours of read / write tests on both drives from DOS which didn't trigger the problem. I've also tried sector scans, new IDE cables and different molex connectors.

The Question: Does anyone know of a free program that will monitor both of these hard drives and log the data to a USB stick, I especially need to know if one of the hard drives loses power. I'm going to kick off a large file copy and then run 3D Mark in the hope of collecting some data.

Thanks :)
 
HD tune is your friend, also have you looked at vistas power management becuase there is an option in there that spins drives down when they arnt being used. Assuming your running vista that is :P
 
I had this problem, was a dodgy vista update, forgot the code. Check windows is up to date and have a look at vista hard drive spin down in google. (No time as I'm at work). Update windows with all the latest patches etc while you're at it. Good luck.
 
I'll check out HD Tune, thanks.

Sorry forgot to give more information here, the system is running Windows XP 32bit SP3 installed (occurred on SP2 as well), nForce2 motherboard. Since the problem appeared to only occur in windows I at first thought that it was possibly something to do with drivers, so on the last re-install I didn't install the IDE drivers.

I have another identical system in the house, however it only has a single hard drive. It doesn't suffer the same problems although it is running XP MCE SP3, so I'm kind of guessing its hardware related in some way.

Edit: I do have a spare student copy of Vista 32 that I might just put on the machine just to see if it resolves the problem, I'm slightly reluctant though as it only has 786mb of ram and runs a GeForce 3 Ti200, it's a positively old rig :P.
 
If it's a positively old machine, then is it a positively old hard drive? It could just be that its getting old.
 
In hard drive life expectancy terms I think so, one of the drives in it has to be around 7 or 8 years, and the other is about 5 or 6. I'm reluctant to change the drives in case it is something else such as the PSU (hence I'm going to load up the system later and see what happens) that is failing and dropping the power. Hopefully if it is just one of the hard drives I can isolate it and whip it out :P. Hopefully if I can actually log the faults with something more than my ears I'll be able to figure it out :)
 
It is wierd what problems a faulty hard drive can make. I had an old pentium 4 3.2 Prescott system, and it kept crashing after around 10 minutes in games. I though it must be a heat issue, so got a cheap thermaltake case, same problem, then bought a new cheap PSU, same problem. Then I actually noticed that my hard drive was making a "grinding noise" when it had to access large amounts of data. Mirrored it to another HDD I had, problem gone.

Don't catch your ears in any case fans though. (I did, and it hurt).
 
cje said:
Don't catch your ears in any case fans though. (I did, and it hurt).
Click to expand...

LOL! I had a mate (70-odd years old) who was messing around and stuck his finger in the CPU fan, it broke a blade and then slashed his finger with the broken edge. Asks me to come round and sort it out, and inside the PC is blood and it's still powered up vibrating like a b*tch :D
 
Yeah, lucky it was a cheap thermaltake sotck case fan, if it was one of those high power scythes or similar i'd be looking like one of mike tysons opponents.
 
Well I ran a few loops of 3D Mark and some small file copies (so it prolly ain't power), I also checked out the SMART info and did some of the tests in HD Tune, no lockups, tomorrow I'll get it copying more files and set off the virus scanner at the same time.

Only problem is HD Tune doesn't seem to do any logging to file that I can see, anyone know of anything I can leave running 24/7 that monitors SMART information or even logs if a hard drive powers down?

Thanks again for the help.

P.S I still have my ears ;)
 
SMART itself logs any changes, the information can be read in the SMART readout. Take a snapshot of that and see what (if anythng) changes.
 
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