I have an Acer Aspire V3-771G laptop With Intel chipset and NVidia 650M Graphics, running Windows 8.1 pro. The laptop has 2 hard drive slots.
A few weeks ago I installed an SSD in my laptop. I freshly installed Windows 8.1 and put some of my frequently used programs on it. My old HDD is in the second internal slot, and contains some of my less used programs, large programs and lots of other data that I don't need frequently.
Here's the thing: although Windows power settings are set to NEVER turn off my hard drives, my HDD turns off frequently. Like, really frequently, if I don't touch it for just a minute or two, it turns off. This makes the simplest things like playing music or running programs off of it really slow, since the hard drive has to 'restart' all the time.
The SSD doesn't seem to have any issues. HD Tune Pro doesn't notice anything wrong with both drives (health status: OK).
So, if Windows Power Management isn't turning off my hard drives, what could be doing it?
EDIT: I don't think there's physical damage to the HDD, because when I leave CPUID HWmonitor running in the background, my HDD doesn't get shut down since it's being accessed constantly.
Answer
I contacted Acer Customer Support the other day.
Apparently power settings only apply to the primary hard drive (where windows is installed). The standby policy of the other hard drives relies on instructions from BIOS or firmware.
KeepAliveHD is a lightweight tool that fixes that, and (as the name implies) prevents the hard drive from going to sleep mode.
http://keepalivehd.codeplex.com/
No comments:
Post a Comment