Hitachi Travelstar 80GN Randomly Spins down

[themysticwizard1]

I have a Gateway M350WVN Laptop with a Hitachi Travelstar 80GN 60 gig Hard Drive (Model IC25N060ATMR04). The problem I am having is it Randomly spins down, then spins back up causing the entire system to stall for a second or two. It really gets annoying.

Interesting thing is I had purchased a different laptop prior to getting this one, and it had the same problem with the hard drive spinning down then spinning back up. I returned it once and got another one of the same model which did the same thing. I am not sure what kind of hard drive was in those systems, but I had thought it was a hard drive problem from the beginning. Now on the third laptop, I am beginning to wonder if this is a harddrive problem, or if it could be some sort of problem with the laptop itself, or is it a newer power saving option?

I have disabled "turn hard disk off after:" in the Power options, but it still spins down, then spins back up.

So has anyone else had this problem with a newer laptop, or does anyone have any thoughts on this issue? It's rather annoying, and I was thinking of replacing the hard drive, but I don't want to do that if it doesn't fix the problem.

Thanks!

 

[chrisjwray]

Some laptops Ive seen, particularly Toshiba have their own custom power management software which overides the windows power management, you could perhaps check for this.

Also, on my old Dell latitude, there are BIOS settings for changing the power management which also seem to overide the windows ones.

Just some Ideas

Chris

 

[themysticwizard1]

So would there be any way to turn off something like this?

It's interesting because the first 2 laptops were infact Toshiba laptops. I am guessing Gateway also has some sort of control over power options which over-ride the windows settings. There is a clean install of XP on this laptop, and I don't recall there being any power control software originally. I am going to check my bios out now, although I don't remember finding anything related to power options before.

I hate the drive spinning down, mostly because it makes the system stall for a second or two, but also because I feel it puts more start stop stress on the drive. I really want to figure out how to turn it off.