Ultrabay HDD doesnt spin down

Hi there!

I have a Western Digital Scorpio Black (7200 rpm) in a genuine Lenovo Utrabay caddy in my T520 running Windows 7 Professional. I use it to supplement the storage on my SSD which is in my main bay. I would like the HDD to spin down when its not in use in order to keep my system quiet but it doesn't seem to want to easily! I tried editing the setting in advanced power options to turn off HDD after 1 minute but it wont do it! It does spin down every now and then but I'd like it to always spin down except when I need to access it. Does anyone have any suggestions? Thanks in advance

 

The UltraBay HDD is treated as an "ejectable" device and will always show up in the "Safely Remove Hardware" tray icon (next to the clock at the right-hand side of the Taskbar). However, the "Safely Remove Hardware" feature can be a minor hindrance when you intend to have a fixed UltraBay HDD that is treated as an internal device, just like the one sitting in the primary bay.

A solution to this is adding a couple of KEYs and DWORDs in the Registry that effectively tell Windows to treat the device on that port as internal (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SYSTEM \ CurrentControlSet \ services \ msahci \ Controller0 \ Channel1 \ TreatAsInternalPort = 1).

This is the fix that I always use together with my UltraBay HDD. However, it only works with the default Microsoft driver for the ATA controller, and not with the Lenovo-supplied Intel driver.

Uninstall the Intel driver (in Device Manager) and reboot. Windows 7 will install its own driver automatically. Then, those new Registry keys and values will be used appropriately.

Check these posts.

 

With the default MS driver instead of the Lenovo-Intel driver, does the drive run fullly at SATA 3 or 6, depending on its specs?

I read elsewhere that installing the Intel RST driver appropriate for the chipset also fixes the problem.

 

Kaso and Gatto:

Thank you for your reply. I can confirm that my HDD does indeed show up as an ejectable device. Do you this is causing my spin down problem (which comes and goes by the way)?

I investigated device manager and under ATA/ATAPI Controllers it says "Intel Mobile Express Chipset SATA AHCI Controller" version 11.2 Am I supposed to have a controller entry for each of my drives listed here? (I should note I have an mSata drive as well) Kaso I saw that you had multiple controllers entries on yours.

One other interesting thing is if I select properties for my HDD there are 2 options for removal policy (quick removal/better performance) and that selecting quick removal disables write caching. do you think selecting quick removal will help?

Thanks Kaso for the link, I will check that out.

Gatto: Do you have a link or any more info about the RST driver?

 

Here's a comment about it.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/lenovo/737159-t440p-first-impressions-11.html#post9495581

 

Hi Kaso:

I am working on your suggestion and it seems to be working. My caddy now spins down promptly and also doesn't show up in the ejectable list.
I edited my registry and went back to ms standard driver. Nice!

One thing that it confusing me is I thought my device manager would look like identical to yours as I too have 3 drives (one main SSD one mSATA and one in caddy). For some reason windows adds ATA Channel 3 and ATA Channel 4, even though I only added 3 keys to registry. any Ideas?

 

Trying to achieve the same ultrabay spin-down in Windows 8 but the msahci registry key does not exist. Any ideas? The HDD was installed in the ultrabay with the standard MS driver. Oddly, my ultrabay drive does not show up in the electable list, either.

 

With reference to MSDN and Microsoft Forums, MSACHI Driver has been replaced by StorACHI Driver. May be this can be of some help.