HDD Spinning Up And Down? - Acer 5755G

Hey guys. I just recently noticed this, so I can't confirm if it's been happening the whole time.
I upgraded to an SSD in the main HDD bay, and put the 2nd hdd in an optical caddy.

The 2nd HDD now goes to a "sleep" or "slumber" mode where it slows down the spin. It does not stop spinning. (So it's not a complete spin down)

It's NOT power manager and hard drive spin down time. They are set to never and everything max performance.

1. Thought it was windows so I changed the HIPM and DIPM in power manager to active, no change.
2. Disabled all power save options, LPM etc. in BIOS, no change.
3. Tried hdd in main bay, no change.
4. Tried a different HDD, still spins up and down. No change.
5. Tried a reformat. No change.
6. Spins down in BIOS settings too.

So I've concluded it may be the hardware doing this?

Does anyone have any ideas?

 

Might be so. whats the HDD model?

edit: try this to disable the APM feature:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/hdparm/

 

Western Digital, I presume?

 

I'm not familiar with how to use that. But it's not the hard drive. I tried another hard drive. It does the same thing, leading to my conclusion that it laptop hardware based.

Actually no. It's a 1TB Seagate st1000lm024. The other hard drive I tried was a 500GB WD Blue WD5000BEVT.

 

Try HDparm regardless. I'm not familiar with this issue on Seagate drives but WD drivers do that because of APM as ericxps mentioned. Maybe this Seagate also has this sort of power management setting.

 

I just tried as I finished typing my previous reply. I used multiple programs and listened to the HDD. All of them, setting APM to disabled, the HDD still spins down... The only program that has any effect is CrystalDiskInfo and HDDScan.

So it seems if AAM and APM is DISABLED, the HDD will spin down by itself...
Setting the values to lowest the HDD will spin down and stop.
When it's ON max for both, it doesn't spin down.

Now the question is, why BOTH hard drives I tried, spinning down by default? Even after a clean install? It must be the laptop then?

I don't *believe* I've had this happen before as I had a 2nd hdd in the caddy before the SSD. Never heard any spinning up and down until now.

 

at least your problem seems to be fixed.
as far as i know both seagate and WD show this sign of APM management. why it never happened before is beyond my knowledge

 

I've looked further into it and someone on the internet has gone as far as inputting a registry string to the ACHI driver.

I seem to have narrowed down the issue. It seems that it may mostly be a windows thing and a registry setting in the ACHI driver. I went ahead and downloaded the best ACHI driver for my 6 series chipset and the HDD does not spin down any more... I think.

As for the AAM and APM, for someone else looking for this information setting both to enable and max value stops the HDD from spinning down... ... but then again, if I disable AAM and APM the HDD *WILL* spin down.