Hard drive keeps powering down

[03bigMark03]

Hiya guys.

I've had this annoying problem for about 2-4 months on it ever since i installed windows 2000 server on my machine.

Basically if I say use my pc for 15 minutes the hard drive will just suddenly power down and will take a short while to powerup again.

I thought it was power management but it's all been disabled in the bios and in Windows 2000 Server.

I don't think it's bad sectors or a duff drive because it used to be fine a while ago. And I don't think it's any power issue (though I haven't tried this with a higher PSU) but I have removed an old 4 gig hard drive and lower my GFX overlcoking to not so high.

I've only Y splitted the power once and that goes to a speed controlled cable from maplin. I have hooked up one fan at 3 volts and one LED fan at 5 volts. So I don't think that should cause to mutch of an issue.

I cleaned out about 2 gig today and defragmented the hard drive but that hasn't helped.

I just don't wat this problem could be. I keep thinking I might of missed something in windows 2000 server because I'm new to this (though I have vast experience in XP, 98 etc).

I hope I've given enough information it's just an annoying problem because it goes down to 1fps in Elite Force (1) when I'm playing online gaming.

I can't live with it now please help me out. It just kinda powers down for a short while thats all i can say.

The drive is a ST330621A and it registered 27.9GB under windows and I'm using the NTFS file system.

 

[03bigMark03]

Bump.

 

[Zedric]

Well maybe the disk is simply going bad?

 

[03bigMark03]

Heh i've only had the drive about a year or so. I don't have loads of money to buy a new drive.

 

[Zedric]

Then send it back. Seagate have 3 years warrenty afaik.

 

[03bigMark03]

Hiya guys. Just been speaking to a mate. He used to use windows 2000 server as well. I embeded it with SP3 so wen it's installed it's fairly up to date. I've installed loads of updates and still getting the problem. My friend reckons it might be somthing to do with the indexing of the files because it's a server edition. But i've disabled that on the right click drive option and the service for it. Still don't know wat this could be.

 

[LeeJend]

The drive spinning down does not sound like a Hard Drive going bad. You haven't mentioned any data corruption so the drive is spinning down intentionally.

Are you absolutely sure you killed all the bios and power save modes?

Try this. Next time you are using the PC, every 5-10 minutes open or save a small file, just enough to reset any power save function that may be set. If the drive doesn't spin down after 30 minutes you still have some power saver set somewhere. At least you will know what to look for.

With a server version of windows it may not be reading and writing the disk. It may have everything cached in RAM. I assume you have a lot of RAM?

I assume this a desktop system since you're gaming and overclcoking?

Checked the Seagatel site to see if this drive has a built in power down feature:

Check page ten of the manual section 1.74. The user can preprogram the drive to go to stabdby mode after a set time.

http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/manuals/ata/u5pmb01.pdf
It appears you have told the drive to annoy you

 

[03bigMark03]

Hiya. I reformated and installed Windows XP Pro Sp1. Everything works great so it must of been the Windows 2000 Server operatin system. Any ideas as to why Windows 2000 Server feels like it's freezing every 15 minutes?

 

[jonifen]

I really need to ask why you actually needed Win2k server on your own machine in the first place - and also why you were playing games on it? Just seems odd to me, thats all...

I imagine it was due to the power settings in Win2K server which must power down components now and then to check their responsiveness or something. I've never actually used it much myself to know for definite, but it would make sense for the OS to be self-checking components now and then.