Hard drives powering down -- when not set to do so!!

[WilburNJ]

Hi all,

I wonder if anyone else is having this problem, which appears on my system a few weeks ago (out of the blue). For some reason, one of my 4 hard drives powers down after a while. Not sure how long, but definitely not hours. More like 30 minutes or so.

My power settings (in Vista32) are set to NEVER power down any hard drives, but at least one of them does so such that my system often halts for 20-30 seconds when I give it a command that catches a sleeping hard drive.

This is most annoying. Any help with this problem would be greatly appreciated.

Regards,

Wilbur

[rltkmkc]

Is it a Western Digital IDE drive? I had one doing that on my D975xbx2 system a while back, thought it was a problem with the drive. Western digital tools never showed anything wrong with the drive but I got a Western Digital to RMA it back because it kept doing it. But when I installed the new drive it does it too just a lot more infrequently. I can actually hear mine spin down, it only does it maybe once every other day or so. The previous drive did it a lot more, three to four times a day. My primary drive which is sata doesn't do it at all. So I'm lucky in that respect. The WD is nothing more than storage and it doesn't take long to spin up again. I think if I start hearing it more often I will replace it with a new seagate sata (get a five year warranty) and get away from IDE all together.