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I really can't google this one out, so if someone could give me some advice

I'm on a laptop, I'm using Windows 8.1 currently
Recently I bought an SSD and set it up as my system drive
I've taken out my CD drive and inserted a hard drive bay where I have a 1TB WD Blue
If I'm not accessing the 1TB drive it goes to sleep/standby/stops spinning every 20 seconds
In Power Management the drives are set to shutdown in 10 minutes (not 20 seconds)

For example, I'm listening to music, and I stop playback. About 20 seconds passes and the drive spins down. What is going on? I've read that drives go to sleep but after 10, 15, 20 minutes, not every 20 seconds. Is the hard drive bay firmware doing this maybe? Or is this a feature of modern drives? Won't this make the drive die sooner, wear it out? When I resume music playback there's a pause until the hard drive starts spinning again and it's kind of annoying, is there a cure for this?

I've had this 1TB drive as my main drive, and a smaller SSD in the CD drive bay with Ubuntu on it, and it never behaved like this, it would shutdown after couple of minutes, if I remember correctly.

Dave
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zorvalent
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3 Answers3

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How peculiar... I just stumbled upon this article while looking for a solution. It's a "success story" so the guy rambles on a bit and writes about things that didn't work first. The meat of it is the bottom half of the first post, where he talks about WDIdleDisable and CrystalDiskInfo.

Note: This solution looks like it may require you to to have the troublesome disk connected via a usb connection with a SATA to USB cable or an external enclosure. That means you might also have to take the drive out of your laptop and boot into a live cd or something if this is your primary and only disk in your machine.

http://community.wd.com/t5/Other-Internal-Drives/WD7500BPVT-spin-down-time-tool-success/td-p/320407

Ubunfu
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Use a tool like QuietHDD and set the timeout value to max (never).

Bigbio2002
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Change setting in Power Management - Advanced - Hard disk to Shut down after 0 <never> minutes.

meatspace
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