Vista pause/hard-drive 'whirring up'...?

[Revenant]

Hi

Rig is as in sig. Running Vista x64 and also XP SP2 on another partition.

Several times a day my PC Vista has this really annoying habit of what seems like accessing the hard drive - everything pauses for a few seconds, theres a building whirr and then some hard drive activity.

It's insanely annoying and happens during all sorts of tasks.

However, my machine is very stable and I use it for several hour at a time.

I also have XP installed and have never had this issue, so I assume that Vista is doing something.

Actually, what it seems like is: the processor suddenly does something - freezing everything, the fans speed up a bit (causing the whirr) and then the hard drive writes something away and the processor is free'd up...

Anyway, I'd like Vista to stop whatever it is doing - any suggestions?

Thanks
Simon

 

[rctneil]

It sounds like a power setting to me. Go into the advanced power preferences and deselect "Power down hdd's for standby" or soemthing similar

 

[Biglunn]

Yup.... increase the timeout on the HDD power down in power management (to match standby timeout) and it will work fine. The `freeze` while the HDDs spin up is actually due to the HDDs reconnecting.

This started to happen to me when I moved from a Gigabyte P35 mobo to an Asus X38 mobo, despite having exactly the same components with the same Vista x64.... I guess its a bit of a quirk with the Asus power management, and sometimes while the PC was frozen for a few secs, the ATI driver tripped out leading to VPU recovery. Running like a (wet) dream since stopping the HDDs powering down.

 

[Revenant]

The only option that I have in Advanced Power Options of Vista is 'Turn HDD off after X minutes' which is now set to 45mins, and I'm still getting the problem.

So... am I looking in the correct place?

Thanks
Simon

 

[uv]

you're looking in the right place. set that timeout to zero.. then your HDD's wont spin down.