HDD not spinning down after idle time correctly

[Lekro44]

Hello,

I'm having a problem with spinning down my secondary internal HDD.

The setup is that I have a main SSD as an OS drive, a secondary SSD for games and an HDD for data storage.

I tried setting the timeout to 1 minute only and it just won't spin down, but sometimes it does after like 6 minutes, completely random. Sometimes spins up randomly without me accessing the drive.

I even gone as far as running the clean command with diskpart on it so its completely unpartitioned and yet it still not spinning down correctly. Also tried partitioning, formatting it and not putting any data on it and that didn't work either.

Another tendency is that when the screen turns off due to timeout and I come back to the PC, just move the mouse for the screen to turn on, the HDD spins up also.

I tried monitoring it with resmon to catch any activity but just plain nothing.

I'm using the default Microsoft AHCI controller.

Can anyone give some insight or ideas about what could be wrong here?

 

[flobernd]

There might nothing be "wrong" with your setup. Could be just stupid Windows trying to perform some maintenance tasks or another process trying to access random volumes.

As for the resmon ... you can't really trust that tool. It shows you every file access (CreateFile API calls to be exactly), but there are other ways to cause the HDD to wakeup (e.g. DeviceIoControl API).

Btw: Most of the time it's healthier to just let the HDD run instead of shutting it down and powering it on multiple times in a short period.

 

[traxxmy]

What is your Hard Disk idle turn off "minutes" setting in Power Option "change advance power setting". There is a option there that allow after certain inactive times, the HDD will turn off.

 

[flobernd]

What is your Hard Disk idle turn off "minutes" setting in Power Option "change advance power setting". There is a option there that allow after certain inactive times, the HDD will turn off.

He set this option to "1 minute" for testing purposes.

 

[Lekro44]

Yeah I did and it's still not spinning down correctly.

 

[traxxmy]

I misread your post and though you are asking why your HDD can always stop spinning.

 

[Lekro44]

Update: I noticed that when the screen times out and turns off (10 mind) the HDD correctly spins down. But as soon as I move the mouse it spins up and the screen turns on (as it should). Is the mouse movement keeping it spinning somehow?

 

[traxxmy]

i think it is hard to made the HDD inactive when you are using it unlike idling. Even window search index could possibly try to indexing your HDD so that count as activity on HDD. I even set mine to stop after 25minutes idle but never once i feel that it ever stop.

 

[flobernd]

Update: I noticed that when the screen times out and turns off (10 mind) the HDD correctly spins down. But as soon as I move the mouse it spins up and the screen turns on (as it should). Is the mouse movement keeping it spinning somehow?

As I already said: Windows decides when to access your HDDs for certain tasks (might be just checking, if it's still connected or something like that). These accesses will wakeup the disc and you CAN'T effectively do anything about that.

I set my idle timeout to 300min/6h. And it's working fine so far as I can tell. Sure it won't shutdown the disc EXACTLY after 6 hours, but if I'm outside for some time and my PC is running, I always come home and the discs are idling.

Not sure why it's so important for you to shutdown the discs so fast, but if it's for durability reasons, please notice this quote from my first post:
"Most of the time it's healthier to just let the HDD run instead of shutting it down and powering it on multiple times in a short period."

 

[Lekro44]

I know it's better for the drive to spin all the time rather than frequent spin up and down. It is a storage only drive that stores data/archives and I very rarely need something off of it. The concern is noise issues when the drive is spinning, I prefer the silent operation a lot. Also I would not like to move to an external solution.

It would be perfect to just spin down the HDD and every once in a while like once a week spin up when I actually need something on it.

 

[Lekro44]

I did some testing.

I set the idle time out to 1 minute and monitored the behaviour. I waited for it to spin down, then accessed a file on it and when I closed everything I started a timer. I did this multiple times and the time always came close to 5 minute (+ - 1 min).

I came to a conclusion that the drive I'm using, which is a 1TB WD Blue by the way, has a minimum idle time out set in its own firmware which cannot be altered through Windows settings.


I have no idea why it actually never put the drive to sleep when the setting was at 20 minutes but it is working fine now as I wanted it to be.

 

[traxxmy]

Since you only need it only once a while then you might just use a software program to disable the HDD or you can try this https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/devtest/devcon .