Hi,
I have a old box running Win2000 for data acquisition with an old 20Gb
Seagate ST320423A drive in it 24/7. I've disabled power saving features for
the HD's in the control panel but after some recent updates, the drive has
been spinning down after a while. When a data acquisition event occurs, the
drive fails to spin up in time and the app looses data. I seem to recall
Seagate drives doing something 'intelligent in this respect - any way to
turn this off ?
On Wed, 21 Nov 2007 12:53:40 GMT, "news.virgin.net"
<anon@anon.net> wrote:
>Hi,
> I have a old box running Win2000 for data acquisition with an old 20Gb
>Seagate ST320423A drive in it 24/7. I've disabled power saving features for
>the HD's in the control panel but after some recent updates, the drive has
>been spinning down after a while. When a data acquisition event occurs, the
>drive fails to spin up in time and the app looses data. I seem to recall
>Seagate drives doing something 'intelligent in this respect - any way to
>turn this off ?
The OS should be caching this, or is the app running at such
a low level it can't?
The setting to keep it running should be as expected in the
power management menu (Control Panel -> Power Options ->
Turn Off Hard Disks: "Never")
If that doesn't work, I would wonder if the drive or PSU is
failing as they are as you say "old". Even a failing
motherboard could intermittently cause a high load that
interferes with the HDD staying spinning or even rarer I
have come across faulty drivers for other devices in a
system that cause the HDD to spin down, though usually
concurrent to this spin-down the whole system resets,
reboots even if the OS setting to reboot-on-error is
disabled.
Perhaps a better question is what recent updates have be
made and were they necessary or could you just undo those,
and/or if it's software related might you have a backup
prior to the changes that you can restore?
"news.virgin.net" wrote:
>
> Hi,
> I have a old box running Win2000 for data acquisition with an old 20Gb
> Seagate ST320423A drive in it 24/7. I've disabled power saving features for
> the HD's in the control panel but after some recent updates, the drive has
> been spinning down after a while. When a data acquisition event occurs, the
> drive fails to spin up in time and the app looses data. I seem to recall
> Seagate drives doing something 'intelligent in this respect - any way to
> turn this off ?
>
> Cheers,
>
> Bruce.
Mike Walsh wrote: ** and top-posted. Fixed **
> "news.virgin.net" wrote:
>
>> I have a old box running Win2000 for data acquisition with an old
>> 20Gb Seagate ST320423A drive in it 24/7. I've disabled power
>> saving features for the HD's in the control panel but after some
>> recent updates, the drive has been spinning down after a while.
>> When a data acquisition event occurs, the drive fails to spin up
>> in time and the app looses data. I seem to recall Seagate drives
>> doing something 'intelligent in this respect - any way to turn
>> this off ?
>
> Disable power saving options in the BIOS.
Ensure that there is sufficient memory to buffer the entire
acquisition cycle before attempting to write it. Barring that, I
suspect your best bet is to query Seagate.
Please do not top-post. Your answer belongs after (or intermixed
with) the quoted material to which you reply, after snipping all
irrelevant material. I fixed this one. See the following links:
seagate HD spindown prevention windows 
Linear Mode
