[Mastiff]

Hi!

I've got an MP3-server that is used about three to four hours every day. The question is if I should let the harddisks sleep the rest of the time. I've heard that going to sleep and waking up again are the procedures that wears out harddisks the most, and if you use them a lot you should just let them spin. But is three to four hours enough to qualify for that? I've got IBM harddisks (and I've never had one of that brand fail so far, and I've had IBM's in four years) and they are from 40 to 80 gigs.


I'm fighting a bit with my MSI KT3 Ultra-ARU - Win XP complains about it not being 100 % APCI compatible when I use to many PCI slots, so I had to force Win XP to install as a regular PC, not as a APCI PC. So using sleep mode for the computer is not an option, alas.


Anybody?

 

[VespaMan]

Yes, there's no reason to have them spinning. You can set the spindown to about one hour if you do not want them to spin up and down too often.


The reason for not spinning them down was primarily true in the early ages of harddisk evolution.


- Micael

 

[Mastiff]

Thanks, neighbour.

 

[audiovideodude]

Heat is the worst enemy of your HTPC. So spin down the disks as soon as possible.

 

[hyslopc]

I used to have 2 x 60GB IBMs, which I set to "quiet mode" using their utility, and I let them go to sleep after a while. The funny thing is that now I've changed to a single 120GB Maxtor, which is running with factory settings, and it goes to sleep even though when I tell XP not to let it spin down. This causes problems in PowerDVD - once or twice every movie, it freezes up for a few seconds, during which time you can hear the hard drive spinning up.


Anyone know why the Maxtor drive ignores XP's power settings, and how I can fix it so it obeys them?

 

[nuthead]

Quote:

Anyone know why the Maxtor drive ignores XP's power settings, and how I can fix it so it obeys them?

Don't know why your drive ignores XP power settings, but check the power management functions in your BIOS, the HDD may be set to suspend after some time.

 

[hyslopc]

You were right! I changed my BIOS power settings to "disable power management" and now everything works fine.