Satellite HDD Frequent Spindown

I have a 1110-S153 Satellite that I bought on ebay as a fixer upper because it had a bad screen. Everything works ok now EXCEPT that the Toshiba hard drive seems to spindown after a few minutes of inactivity. I did all the usual and checked windows power settings and nada. The bios doesn't have any power management settings so I'm wondering what's going on. I googled and came upon an old thread that said this is a "feature" with some Toshiba laptops. Really? The constant spin downs/ups will murder the drive sooner than later. I took the drive out and am using it now in my other Dell laptop and it doesn't seem to do it. I'm just wondering if this is really a feature or something is bad on the motherboard that would be causing this? Any thoughts or advice?

 

I've never heard of this feature before nor have i experienced it on my old Toshiba Tecra M2. However, i found THIS thread that might be useful to you.

 

Yeah that's the thread I was talking about.

I had a Tecra 8200 and it didn't do it.

My next steps are to try to force the power management settings on the hard drive to stay off with hdparm or try another non Toshiba hard drive in the laptop and see what it does.

 

Just thought I would make a follow up post incase someone elses comes across this issue. My "fix" ended up being to just turn off the drive's standby mode with hdparm. I tried a different drive and this laptop and it did the same thing, I know that one worked normally on another lappy. Also the one I have in it now giving me the problems worked normally on another laptop. So the problem is with this unit itself, but I was unable to figure out if it's a hidden bios enabled feature or some hardware fault. Either way this fix is good enough for me for now.