Help with Hard Drive spin-down

Factual Questions
1

Greetings!

I am looking for some help with fixing an annoying hard drive problem. I have an external hard drive setup where the HD spins down after only a few minutes, so that Windows 7 stops recognizing it. I want to see what sort of options I have to fix this.

The base computer is a home-built x86 computer based on an ASUS P5Q-E motherboard, with an Intel dual-core processor and 4GB RAM. This motherboard supports SATA, including eSATA. I have a 1 TB internal WD hard drive. The OS is Windows 7 Professional.

I put a Western Digital WD20EADS 2TB Caviar Green internal drive into a Vantech 3x external enclosure that supports USB 2, Firewire, and eSATA and hooked it up with eSATA. I have the drive formatted with one partition of 1.8TB using NTFS. When I turn the drive on, Windows 7 recognizes it for about 5 minutes, but then it goes offline and I can’t get Windows to recognize it again.

The 2TB hard drive is designed to be internal. WD says that it will automatically spin down, and there is no way to change this, but that read attempts will spin it back up again. Vantech doesn’t seem to have any settings for preventing the drive from spinning down. They recommend turning off all power-saving options in Windows 7, which I’ve done.

In particular, when I try to use Retrospect 7.6 to back up the 1TB internal drive to the 2TB drive in the external enclosure, Retrospect gives me an error that the device can’t be accessed, just as it is starting to write out files. I don’t think this is Retrospect-related, since the hard drive will go offline even if I just let it sit unused for a few minutes.

I haven’t yet had a chance to test this with USB or Firewire.

If you’ve seen this before and have some advice, please send it along. If you know of a more expert forum on which to ask this question, please send that along! You can, of course, tell me to use your own favorite backup solution, but I’m less likely to follow that advice immediately. Being stubborn and the typical computer scientist, I prefer to find the original problem and fix it first.

PS - I am comfortable doing just about anything to a computer, and I can program in C++, Java, Python, etc. I am not in the mood to open up hard drives, because my impression is that this almost never makes them work any better.:smiley:

2

You could probably set up a scheduled task that runs every few minutes. It could do something like create a blank text file through a cmd prompt script and then delete it. That might work and shouldn’t take too much overhead.

3

Have you tried using USB, just to see if it acts differently than eSATA?

4

Your problem is not that the hard drive spins down – it is designed to do exactly that when not being used, both to conserve energy (being ‘green’), reduce wear on the drive, and keep it from overheating. You should NOT be trying to prevent this.

The problem is that Windows 7 takes it offline, or fails to recognize it and reconnect when the drive is accessed and spins up again. Spend your time fixing this, the real problem.

P.S. In the meantime, a temporary fix might be to put the Windows Page file onto this disk. That is used frequently (especially if you don’t have a lot of memory) and so will probably keep this disk spinning regularly. But still, that is NOT a good thing.

5

I agree exactly. Since it’s designed as an internal drive, I have to allow it to spin down to prevent it from overheating. I don’t know how WD designed it, so I have to assume that it’s not meant to take as much wear as a drive that’s spinning all the time that the computer is on.