How to make hard disk stop?

[MichaelMeier]

I wonder why I can set in the power manager a time for the hard disk to spin down? It is not doing it! It seems, Windows is doing something regularly that prevents the disk from spinning down.

What is it?
How do I get rid of it so the disk can rest?


Please help!

[dawhim]

it only works when your laptop is idle

[sugo]

The spin down counter resets itself whenever there is hard drive access. You can use the FileMon tool to figure out what is causing the HDD activities.

[MichaelMeier]

Great idea stopping all the things that are accessing the hard disk. The only problem with that is: it leaves the computer in an unusable state.

I could get myself to deactivate active protection and take care not to drop it. Didn't plan on dropping it anyways. So who needs the active protection for the hard disk?
Now, how do I get rid of the svchost process that accesses the hard disk every few seconds? Easy: disable all network related services including the firewall.

OK, only one thing left: winlogon.exe. How do I get rid of it? Of course: don't login. Brilliant.


Just kidding.
But to be serious again: why can I specify a hard disk spin down timeout when it is not used because there are hard disk accesses all the time? What kind of useless feature is that?

[jdhurst]

<snip> Didn't plan on dropping it anyways. So who needs the active protection for the hard disk?<snip>

Those of us who have knocked our thinkpads onto the floor didn't plan to do it. ... JDH