How to tell if the hard drive is spun down?

[Tõnis]

Is there a convenient way to know whether my hard drive has spun down and/or when it spins back up? I can't really hear it ... Is the little hard drive light always indacative of hard drive activity? The reason I ask is that I'll see the hard drive light flicker ever so slightly from time to time even when I'm not doing anything and the timer has supposedly spun the drive down. Does this mean that if I see the light flicker, the drive has started to spin again? TIA for your thoughts.

Tony

[rkawakami]

I used to know of a utility program that resides in the System Tray which tells you when the drive is being accessed. I'll try to hunt it down again. My understanding is that when the hard drive LED blinks, it indicates that data is being transferred to/from the drive, so yes it should be spinning at that time. There's some background processes that read or write from the disk so unless you identify and stop them (if possible, without affecting the operation of the system), the drive is going to spin up and down.

[Tõnis]

Thanks, Ray. I set the machine on a power configuration that spins down the hard disk after 30 seconds, and I did manage to hold my ear to the machine and listen to the hard drive. It spun down after 30 seconds as expected, but it spun right back up within a couple of seconds. I listened numerous times, with and without wireless, etc, but the drive would not stay spun down. I can't imagine that's good for it. Still, I hope it doesn't mean I should disable and forget about the spin down hard drive feature altogether.

[rkawakami]

There's a whole bunch of programs that come to mind that will access the hard drive without your explicit direction: virus scanners, Windows file indexing, any number of desktop widgets/applets, etc. In researching the utility program that I mentioned earlier I ran across FileMon, a part of Sysinternals. That's been replaced by Process Monitor, available from here:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysi ... s/bb896645

[Tõnis]

There's a whole bunch of programs that come to mind that will access the hard drive without your explicit direction: virus scanners, Windows file indexing, any number of desktop widgets/applets, etc. In researching the utility program that I mentioned earlier I ran across FileMon, a part of Sysinternals. That's been replaced by Process Monitor, available from here:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysi ... s/bb896645

Thanks again, Ray. Had it installed before my OS reload, but I forgot all about it after. Now I should do a bit of homework and figure out how to use it to discover what processes might be keeping the hard drive from settling down.

Tony

[Tõnis]

I'm still trying to rule out the variables on what's causing my hard drive to spin up again after it has stopped rotating. I thought maybe the wireless card was pinging the hard drive, but it happens even if I shut it off with the hardware switch. So far, I've turned off virus protection, and the intervals when the hard drive is stopped have become longer, but it still kicks on in a matter of a minute or two. I also made sure all browsers were closed. And I still haven't figured out how to use Process Monitor to see what wakes up the hard drive, but I do watch the task manager and try to notice what process appears in the moment that it happens. The most substantial one I've noticed in the exact moment the hard drive starts spinning is "SYSTEM," but I suppose that doesn't tell me much. A minor ones that show up is s24evmon.exe. I wonder if the fan coming back on might do it? I dunno ...

Tony