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    Secondary HDD constantly spinning up and down?

    Discussion in 'Alienware 14 and M14x' started by tangerines, Aug 10, 2013.

  1. tangerines

    tangerines Notebook Geek

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    Hey guys,

    So, I have my Alienware 14 set up with a 256GB mSATA boot drive. I have the second 750GB HDD in 2 partitions: one partition for steam and other games, and one for data (music, movies, etc.). I have the power settings to turn off the hard disks after 5 minutes of inactivity. So my secondary games/data drive will spin for 5 minutes and then turn off when I'm not accessing data off it, which is expected. However, after it spins down, it will spin back up after a couple seconds. Then it'll spin down again after a couple seconds, then back up again, so on and so forth. The status lights indicate that something is accessing the harddisk when this happens, but I can't figure out why. Resource monitor shows a random spike of activity on the data drive every couple seconds, active disk programs being STservice.exe (which I think is AlienRespawn), SVChost, and System. Any ideas what's going on?

    Also, a separate question, but do any of you guys have a loud click occur sporadically? Something loudly clicks periodically from the HDD/optical drive area (I have the HDD and blu-ray player) and I just wanted to see if this is normal. Thanks for the help guys!
     
    tangerines, Aug 10, 2013
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  2. pancakes1983

    pancakes1983 Notebook Guru

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    Clicking sounds like the hard drive has some problems, the spinning up and down sounds like a power saving setting that's turned on within windows.
    As your boot drive is the msata, windows is probably recognising that it's not using the mechanical HDD and spinning it down to save power
     
    pancakes1983, Aug 10, 2013
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  3. tangerines

    tangerines Notebook Geek

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    Turns out it was STservice.exe. Killing the process gets rid of both issues for whatever reason.
     
    tangerines, Aug 10, 2013
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  4. Alienware-L_Porras

    Alienware-L_Porras Company Representative

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    it may be that the executable file is constantly trying to access the drive and causing the issue. I'm glad you got it sorted out.
     
    Alienware-L_Porras, Aug 13, 2013
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  5. tangerines

    tangerines Notebook Geek

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    Just to update, stservice.exe is connected to alienrespawn (and causes respawn to load at startup). If anyone wants to stop alienrespawn from automatically starting on boot without uninstalling it, you can do this:

    Go to start and launch services.msc. Then look for something along the lines of "Smart Think Agent." Right-click and go to properties and change start-up from "automatic" to "manual." Now it'll only start when you manually launch respawn. STservice.exe will also not run in the background and it won't access your drives, preventing spin-up and spin-down.
     
    tangerines, Aug 13, 2013
    #5