Primary hard-drive does not spin down (XP power save options)

[TheVoice]

Hi guys, hoping you might be able to finally clear something up that's been bugging me for...quite a while.

Windows XP has the option to spin down the hard-drives after a certain time in order to save power, reduce heat, that sort of thing. However, I've always noticed that it never actually works on primary hard-drives (the HDD that Windows is installed to). My PC's primary HDD never spins down, nor do they in my parents' PCs, or my new notebook (which is annoying when you're trying to save power/heat output). There always seems to be some kind of tiny disk operation happening every few seconds.

However, secondary hard-drives DO spin down - my PC has a second HDD (with the pagefile on it) and it spins down after the set amount of time.

Does anyone else have this issue? I bring it up because I'm trying to get my notebook's HDD to spin down, but it never does.

Any ideas?

 

[Radiation]

If your using it at the time then i doubt it will ever spin down, theres pretty much always something accessing it if you got a bunch of services and programs running, i wouldn't worry about it tbh as i doubt you will get great savings from the hard drive not spinning, im sure others will know more though when it comes to laptops.

 

[smids]

My thinkpad powers down the HDU when I leave it alone - maybe it's the Thinkpad power management driver which helps I don't know but mine does power down.

 

[Zefan]

AFAIK Windows is pretty much constantly accessing. Well, if I unplug my disk during operation, even when totally idle it makes my pc go bye bye.