Secondary hard drive keeps going into standby mode

[Ruudjah]

Since the current bottleneck of computing today is defeinitly the hard drive, I purchased an ultrabay hard drive module. I hardly ever use cd's, so I decided to put the Program Files & My Documents folder on this drive. This works really well, performance in VS2005 and Fireworks is way increased. The 'feel' is much better!

However... The drive in the ultrabay keeps spinning up about 6 times a minute... I think since the bay was designed to hold an optical drive, if the optical drive is not used, it automatically switches to standby mode to save energy. It does this really fast, which is logical since optical drive access is very different from hard drive acces. An optical drive is only used in short timeframes which in itself are pretty rare compared to overall use of the PC.

Am I correct in diagnosing the problem? If yes, what should I do about it to prevent the hard drive in going to standby mode? If no? Any guesses on what the problem may be?

Thanks in advance! Your cooperation is really appreciated!

[truk]

The ultrabays were designed for all kinds of devices, so the "spinning up" would be caused by the OS nearly any way you look at it. I believe you are still diagnosing the problem correctly, it's a power saving feature. If you go into the battery manager, you should have an option to set the CD rom to "High Performance" mode. Look around in your power manager for similar features also. Unfortunately, some hard drives are just noisy and do this anyway when they are set up as secondary, so there may be no solution.

If you are running XP, this might also help. Go into my computer, right click your extra drive, and click properties. Go into the hardware tab and make sure the ultrabay drive is selected. Then click properties. In the policies tab, select the option for "optimize for performance". Write caching won't make a big difference, I don't believe, but you might want to try it. WARNING: This will make it take longer to correctly disconnect the drive.

Sorry for the loads of "try this", but trial and error seems to be the best thing here, and I don't have the equipment to do it for you.

Hope this helps, let me know how it turns out!
Truk

[Ruudjah]

I tried all your noted possible solutions. They didnt work. The CD-drive was already on high performance. I could not find any features in my power management which implicated a lead to resolve this problem. The " optimize for performance" option was already set.
Thanks for your help!

[Temetka]

Try modifying your power scheme. Call it custom and set it not to spin down your drives.