Samsung ST1000LM024 1TB Hard Drive Constant Intermittent Spinning?

Is anyone else using a Samsung ST1000LM024 1TB hard drive in their m17x's?

I order my config with this config:

1TB RAID 1 (2x 1TB SATA 3Gb/s 5,400 RPM) + 64GB mSATA Caching SSD

Dells sources Samsung for all 3 of these parts (2 x HDD + 1 x SSD).

If you listen closely, you can hear both drives spinning up for about 1 sec every 2-3 seconds. I set my hard drives to sleep after 1min and they continue to do this even after 1 minute of being idle. This is killing my battery.

Is anyone else experiencing this?

 

Sounds like normal hard drive behavior to me. I've got a pair of WD Scorpio Black drives in RAID 0 in my R2. Anytime my system tasks the RAID storage volume (D:\ Drive), the hard drives spin up and remain spinning for up to a minute. I can always hear the HDD heads park at the same time if the drives have been idle for more than two minutes. This is also true on our desktop RAID volume. The only advice I can offer is for you to see what program or process is tasking the RAID volume. For me it's Dreamscene accessing the video file for my live desktop wallpaper. But it can be any background process saving or accessing a file on the RAID volume. Once you determine what it accessing the volume, you can stop the process so it no longer tasks the volume and (in theory) will not cause your drives to spin up.

 

I have actually disabled RAID on my system, so I am running 2 x HDD individually and the 64gb msata SDD is my Intel RST cache drive.

I'm going to image my system and reinstall Windows bare bones and see if this still happens. I suspect that this is a Samsung HDD drive defect.

 

You can also try running each hard drive individually and see if there is only one that constantly spins up. If your OS drive is the only one that spins up, then it may be an issue with Windows, but then again, it may just be a background process that is constantly accessing files on the OS drive.

 

It seems normal to me also. But there could be something in the background accessing it. It could be a good idea to reinstall.

 

My mom has the same exact 1TB model in her new Inspiron 17r SE except that she's running Windows 8 and her drive does the same exact thing. She only has one drive in her system.

 

I think it is better to not send the drive to spin down and let it constantly spin since there is always a program which accesses some data on the drive which will force the drive to spin up again.