hard drive constant spindown

hi. i bought a western digital scorpion blue 500gb hdd 2 weeks ago. i didnt notice the problem then. basically the hdd spinsdown after 10 seconds. so for e.g if i cam making music via reason, it has to pause for 2 seconds to start spinning again. this also affects performance in microsoft word. it has a lag while typing. i installed the 2 softwares on my stock hdd and they ran fine. so my question is, is there a way to stop the hdd from spinning down? i have tried using diskinfo but it didnt help.

my hdd - WDC WD5000BEVT-22A0RT0

btw the hdd is intalled in my laptop (its internal)

thanks.

 

If you go into control panel/power options, select your power setting and then select "advanced settings" there is a tab inside where you can change hard drive "sleep" settings, including turning off the HDD sleep entirely.

 

the thing is that setting only affects my stock drive the seagate one. it doesnt affect my 2nd hdd the wd one.

 

My understanding is that the power setting should affect ALL connected drives.

Googling the issue produces a fairly large ammount of similar issues. Majority of possible solutions are similar to my original post.

The other thing I found was regarding external WD drives, it is stated/suggested that it's built into the firmware of the drive itself, and only by having something small write to the drive every 5-10 minutes will ultimately resolve the issue. UNfortunately, all the sites I visited with ways to perform this only had instructions for OS/X.

Given that the only difference between an external WD drive and an internal one is that one comes inside an extra box, this may well be a firmware issue. If I find any more information on resolving, I'll update post.

 

Have you tried looking up if there's any firmware updates to address this issue? You can also try using SMART softwares that lets you adjust Advanced Power Management settings to see if it spins down after you turn that off. HDScan (the early version) will let you do this but only its only temporary. Hitachi Feature Tools allows permanent change.

 

Thanks i will give the software you mentioned a go. Also there is no firmware update for my hdd. WD are scum like that.

 

ok tried the hp one. it doesnt recognize my wd hdd. then i tried other smart supporting softwares and still no luck.

 

The problem of the drive is the APM.
Use hdparm to switch off APM:
hdparm -B 255 /dev/sda
This is the command for linux where /dev/sda is the WD5000BEVT. I think hdparm also exits for other systems.
You have to issue the command on every boot because the drive does not store the settings permanently. If someone knows how to store the setting permanently, please let me know.

 

@paul173 create an entry in /etc/hdparm.conf

 

Using Hitachi Feature Tools stores the settings permanently.