Hard Drive never turns off when on

[Mugrunty]

Hello, I was just wondering if any of you ppl with T60s have ever heard the HD stop spinning. In the power manager thing you can set it to turn off after 30secs, 3 min......but mine never does. If i put it on 30 secs and wait 30secs, it never turns off. Even if i leave the room for and hour and come back, the harddrive is still spinning away. Just wanted to know if something is conflicting with letting it turn off or if any of you guys have heard it turn off. weird... k thanks!

[jdhurst]

It seems to me that if the CPU is on, there is always something talking to the hard drive. So if you really want the HD off, you need to suspend the machine. Otherwise, it runs, and that does not hurt it, so just accept it. ... JD Hurst

[Mugrunty]

k thanks! Just wanted to know if it was weird that it was never turning off.

[RonS]

If the system is idling or doing repetitive tasks, the hard drive should be able to spin down until the write cache is flushed to disk. I've had other systems spin down their drives even while I was using Word.

Here's a guess - try setting the SATA to Compatibility mode in the BIOS. See if spins down that way.

[claudeo]

Suspect Diskeeper.

[briansmith]

I noticed that when I was using my T60, the disk was constantly being accessed. I looked into it and this is what I found:

Download FileMon from SysInternals. This will tell you what files are being read from/written to. You will see the following:

Message Center (amsg.exe) is reading files from C:\Documents And Settings\All Users\... periodically. You can shut down message center to prevent this.

If you have the APS tray icon on, explorer.exe will read tpshock[something] every 30 seconds or so. You can disable the APS tray icon to prevent this.

If you have the ATI Hotkey Poller service enabled, then ati2evxx.exe may constantly (multiple times per second) try to access certain files. I use Comodo Personal Filewall, and ati2evxx.exe was constantly trying to read one of its CPF's DLL's. I disabled the ATI Hotkey Poller service to prevent this.

The APS logging service will write logging information about APS somewhere. You can disable the APS logging service to prevent this.

Terminal Services does almost constant I/O for some reason that I do not understand. You can disable the Terminal Services service to prevent this. (This will also disable fast user switching.)

I also uninstalled Comodo Personal Firewall and Diskeeper.

Power Manager will access its configuration file in C:\Program Files\Thinkpad\Utilities\US once per minute. I don't know of any way to prevent this short of disabling power manager.

Doing all of the above, I was able to get my T60 into a state where the hard drive light would usually stay off when I wasn't doing anything. But, sometimes it will start flashing for no obvious reason and I can hear the disk grinding away.

Whenever I am using the computer I am usually using Firefox and/or programming, both of which require a lot of disk accesses (although, you might be able to get Firefox to stop accessing the disk drive if you turn off the disk cache). So, I stopped futzing with it.

[jdhurst]

Good post. You disable more than I want to, and if I have interpreted your post properly, the disk is not likely to stay off for more than a couple of minutes, even with a bunch of stuff disabled. I don't think a modern computer would stay running if the disk could be turned off for (say) 10 minutes.

On the other hand, my first laptop was a Toshiba DOS laptop that had a hard drive switch. If your program was all in memory (you could do that in DOS) you could turn off the hard drive and survive for quite a long time. Modern systems, though, have a registry and like files that are constantly being accessed for proper operation and integrity of the file system overall.
... JD Hurst

[GomJabbar]

I agree that if you are using your computer, the hard disk is going to run. However, if you just have the computer on, with no applications actively processing data, I would think that Power Options would allow the hard drive to turn off until it was needed again - either through user input, external input, or a scheduled task. Sort of like a lighter version of Standby. Now some programs are going to cause the hard drive to become active again, even though nothing else is going on. Some screensavers come to mind.

Perhaps one could open Task Manager to the Processes tab, and watch for processes that are using the CPU when the computer is idle. That may allow for finding programs or processes that are preventing the hard drive from turning off - that is after the timeout period chosen in Power Options has elapsed.

[briansmith]

If you want to use Task Manager, you can turn on the "I/O Reads," "I/O Writes," "I/O Other," "I/O Read Bytes," etc. columns to see what processes are accessing the disk. But, you will see that there are services like csrss.exe and lsass.exe that are doing I/O on behalf of other software, so it often isn't that helpful.

I think that the biggest reduction for me came from disabling Terminal Services. For most laptop users, Terminal Services (Fast User Switching, Remote Desktop, Remote Assistance) is not useful and I personally feel it is a big security risk.

The other things I did were not so helpful--I will be reinstalling Diskeeper and Comodo Firewall, for example, as removing them hurt more than it helped.

I do agree with the idea that on a laptop the disks shouldn't be doing work when web browsing or watching a DVD, at least while on battery power, in order to conserve power.

[Mugrunty]

yup, I used to have an old Toshiba that ran windows ME. When It was just sitting or if i was reading a word document, the hardrive would turn off after 3 minutes and stay off. It would turn back on if i tried to save it, or if i tried to access something from the hard drive. (look at the start menu for example).

[RonS]

It just worked for me.

I'm using an undocked thinkpad, connected to wall power, in a quiet room. After my previous post on this thread, I still had my power settings configured to turn off hard disks after 5 minutes while plugged in.

I got off the phone, opened a browser and heard my hard drive spinning up. It was very quiet, but definietly there.

[agarza]

OK. I'll try the suggestions posted above to see if my E7K100 would turn off, the [censored] thing is always ON.

Anyone knows what's for this service:

IBM KCU Service:
C:\WINDOWS\system32\TpKmpSVC.exe

Thank

[RonS]

Thinkpad Key Mapping Service, I think.

[agarza]

Thinkpad Key Mapping Service, I think.

Does it work to assign hotkets ??