Running Windows 7, 7600, 64bit I have 5 SATA hard drives running in AHCI mode Setting the hard drive spin down time to 45 minutes using the "balanced" power profile allows all hard drives to spin down after the correct amount of time. Verified by actually hearing the spin down/up, and by the delay when opening the drive. If I set the spin down time to 60 minutes, none of the hard drives will ever spin down. Someone else has stated they had a similar problem but it was remedied when they went from 5 drives to 2. This issue has occured for me in Builds 7000, 7100, and 7600.

Hi John,You can use the problem in Device Clean Boot mode and check if the problem is caused by certain incompatible device:Device Clean Boot================1. Remove the wirelessmouse or USB printervice from the computer. Click "Start", type "DEVMGMT.MSC" in the Search textbox and press Enter. Please click Allow if the User Account Control window is prompted.2. Expand "Sound, video and game controllers". 3. Right click on your Sound Card, select "Properties"4. Click "Driver" tab, click Disable (Disable the selected device). Click OK.5. Use the same method to disable other hardware: Display adapter, Modem, network adapter, CD-R drive.Then, restart your computer and check whether the issue persists. Click "Driver" tab, click Enable (Enable the selected device). Click OK.If the issue does not occur, we can re-enable the devices one by one to narrow down the root cause. Thomas Lin

Thanks for the reply. Using that method to diagnose this problem would take forever. (Considering after each change I would need to wait an hour to figure out what is going on) As a simple test, I set my disk spindown time to 59 minutes (instead of 60), and ALL of the drives seem to spin down properly. I would notion that any time < 60 minutes seems to work correctly, but I haven't tested many values. I can try values > 60 at some point this week, as well. Setting the value to exactly 60 minutes seems to be an issue for me.

Obviously, you hase a scheduled task that runs every 60 minutes and this causes disk activity. I've found that with Vista and with Windows 7, Drive C: is always up to something or other; so when I walk away,it never spins down after the power plan time interval. No matter how short the interval.Is there anybody out there with a C: drive that will shut off via Power Plan ??

I do not believe this to be the case. Defrag & Windows Defender have been disabled. Even then, those were set to run at 2 or 3 AM. Are there any other tasks you can think of? I do not see any scheduled tasks that would run hourly, none the less run on every drive. Again, my computer does not have to be idle for my drives to spin down... just the drive activity. Windows does a bunch of 'busy work' when the computer goes idle... so yes they could wake my drives up, but that's only if the computer is idle. Like I said, I have five drives. Naturally C:\ is going to be busy with temp files and all of that. I'm not too concerned with that. My concern is with my other drives. I don't need them to be running unless i'm working with the files on them. I don't know of anything in windows that would cause them to be touched every hour regardless.

Are there any other tasks you can think of? You'll find a task called CrawlStartPages in the TaskScheduler Shell folder. Try disabling that as an experiment.I've long wondered (Vista) exactly what it does, as its Actions tab lists it as a Custom Handler and doesn't permit editing it. But to get a rough idea what crawl might mean in this context, skim this articleCrawl content (Search Server 2008). It says: "Crawling content is the process by which a system accesses and parses content and its properties, sometimes called metadata, to build a content index from which search queries can be served... Typically, you want to automate most crawls by scheduling them."As another experiment,try disabling the Windows Search Serviceto see if Indexing is causing the drives to stay awake. Setting the hard drive spin down time to 45 minutes... allows all hard drives to spin down after the correct amount of time.If I set the spin down time to 60 minutes, none of the hard drives will ever spin down. Someone else has stated they had a similar problem but it was remedied when they went from 5 drives to 2. The problem only occurs at 60 minutes and beyond. So it's hard to understand how an asynchronous task might be involved.Maybe 45 minutes is close enough?

Hi,To check if the problem iscaused by certain task, disabling the Task Scheduler service for test:1. Click the "Start" Button in the "Start Search" bar, type: "services.msc" (without quotes) and press Enter. If you are prompted for an administrator password or confirmation, type the password or provide confirmation. 2. Double click the service "Task Scheduler" and set the "Startup Type" to "Disable". Then please click the "Stop" button under "Service Status" to stop the service. Thomas Lin

John, there must be certain process/program running background and prevents HDs from spinning down. In order to check it, pls try to check your Disk I/O status. Use Task Manager, switch to Process tab, click View->Select Columns. Select all I/O related options and monitor the result. E.g. sort processes by I/O Other and find out which process keep using the disk (even if you have close all application and there is no activity at all) Meanwhile, you can switch to Performance tab and use Resource Monitor to get another Good view of your disk activity chart.

I don't know how Win7 instructs the drives to spin-down. It could be manual, or automatic via the drives' internal timers. So possibly, it is not any particular activity that is keeping the drives awake. Instead, it might be the way the drives were programmed to go to sleep.Here's a link tothe recent Working Draft ATA/ATAPA Command Set-2 (ACS-2)http://www.t13.org/Documents/UploadedDocuments/docs2009/d2015r2-ATAATAPI_Command_Set_-_2_ACS-2.pdfAs anexample, see page 189 for the Idle/Standby Timer table encoding. Also, search the document for APM and spin down.

I have this problem as well; 5 SATA drives, all of which spin-down at the prescribed interval with BSD,Linux, Microsoft Windows XP, and Microsoft Server 2003 -- but with Microsoft Windows 7 none of the drives will spin down regardless of the time interval set in the power profile.I've tried everything mentioned in this thread, and a few things that have not been;the fact that my drives are reference Western Digital drives, that they work fine with other operating systems without this issue suggests to me that this is a Microsoft Windows 7 issue -- very disappointing...=O(

I don't know how Win7 instructs the drives to spin-down. It could be manual, or automatic via the drives' internal timers. So possibly, it is not any particular activity that is keeping the drives awake. Instead, it might be the way the drives were programmed to go to sleep.Here's a link tothe recent Working Draft ATA/ATAPA Command Set-2 (ACS-2)http://www.t13.org/Documents/UploadedDocuments/docs2009/d2015r2-ATAATAPI_Command_Set_-_2_ACS-2.pdfAs anexample, see page 189 for the Idle/Standby Timer table encoding. Also, search the document for APM and spin down. Carey, here's another branch of my contributions here that you have failed to delete tonight. You're finger getting tired yet? Of course not. It never does.

I guess my main question is then, how come XP has no issue with the same configuration and drives spin down after the allotted time set, but Windows 7 behaves differently? I have my spin down time set to 55minutes now, and lately it now seems to be hit or miss. I have noticed that after waking up, I'll launch a program, usually firefox, and it will trigger all of my drives to spin up. Checking the performance monitor when this happens, windows is reading my hidden file/folder NTFS master file table for each drive. a bit unneccessary when firefox is only on the C drive. Again, this was fine in XP. I am confident there's a bug somewhere.

Any luck John tracking down the source of the issue? I've hit the wall, nothing will get my drives to spin down... I wonder if in my case it might be an NVIDA controller or driver issue as the 680i chipset was known to have HD controller issues...:/

Any luck John tracking down the source of the issue? I've hit the wall, nothing will get my drives to spin down. Same symptoms here, but I have a mix of 3 SCSI U320 drives (running off an Adaptec 39320 card sitting in a PCI slot, so it yields U160 speeds) and 1 WD SATA drive in one Win7 x64 machine, and 3 SCSU U320 drives (also on a 39320 but sitting in a PCI-X slot, so it yields U320 speeds) and 2 WD SATA drives in a second Win7 x64 machine. As with other reports, this setup used to work fine under WinXP with Adaptec drivers and standard MS support on both machines. All unused drives would spin down after 15-minutes of idle (that was my preferred setting) and spin back up when needed. I could hear all of this (as well as observed the expected delay when spin-up was required) and thus knew it was happening as I'd wanted. In contrast, this does not seem to happen at all now on either Win7 machine... even though I have specified the same 15-minute spin-down period for hard drives in "balanced power saving" plan. Simply does not work, suggesting something is periodically (and quite regularly) peeking at each drive for some reason, thus eliminating it from idle eligibility as all the drives give the appearance of being "busy" at least once in that 15-minute period. At first I thought it might be Everest, but have tried closing it and see no difference. Everest has "S.M.A.R.T." sensor logic which checks drive temperatures, etc. Unfortunately this also keeps the drives spun-up, as I discovered under WinXP. So I've long since turned that OSD sensor off (under WinXP this worked) so that the drives would spin-down when truly idle. But this does not seem to be the answer under Win7, since the same sensor is OFF and besides even when I close Everest and it's not running there is still never a spin-down on any drive. I've just now installed the latest Win7 x64 driver for the 39320 obtained from the Adaptec site and am about to reboot (on this machine, anyway), but honestly I don't expect it to make a difference. I suspect it's something else within Win7 that is running around looking at drives... perhaps as has been suggested maybe it's Windows Search and its attempt at keeping indexes current. I may try disabling it (since I don't actually use it, given that I know where everything I have resides on all drives and all partitions C-M). I do know that many years ago when I used Corel Word Perfect and hadn't learned yet that it, too, had a "Quick Find" optional feature which constantly looked at all drives to keep indexes current, I was seeing a similar symptom. I subsequently learned that I could opt-out of this feature at install, and that eliminated Quick Find, and that eliminated my drives being kept spinning permanently. Sure enough, I once again had my 15-minute idle spin-down. And this worked on WinXP too. I will follow this thread, in case others have some big breakthrough for Win7. I'm about to convert one of my machines to an HTPC (which would really only use maybe 2 of 5 drives most of the time, perhaps 3 of 5) and I'd certainly prefer to have unused drives spun down when not being used. Although my SATA drives are very very quiet I still should be able to observe the delay when accessing them, if they'd actually spun down (or at least the second non-OS SATA drive on that other machine). For sure, I know I can both hear the spin down/up and also observe the access delay (if spin-up is needed) for ANY of my SCSI drives. So I'll know for sure if this ever works.

Hey guys, I haven't really found a solution to the problem... I have the hard-drive idle time set to 55 minutes and my drives will eventually spin down. Unfortunately it was the only setting that allowed this.. if I set it to 45 or 60, it doesn't work. One thing I have noticed though, is that my drives will ALL spin up when they shouldn't. For instance, a lot of times I will open calculator to crunch a few numbers and all of my drives will spin up. I think there's definitely something that is causing drives to get accessed when they shouldn't (and consequently never spin down)... and I don't believe it's a scheduled service (defrag, search, etc)

I can't believe this has gone on for as long as it has without any support or comment from Microsoft... It looks like one those things that the typical User and even the Enterprise in many cases as my experience has shown is not going to notice, so is more pervasive then might be assumed from this thread. By way of example; I've observed this issue on over a dozen PCs running Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 since I first posted to this thread at work, owned by friends and acquaintances, where spin-down doesn't work. In a few cases where I had an opportunity to test with a a Linux lived DVD all would spin-down in the prescribed time just fine. Initially I thought this might be an issue with specific chip set's disk controllers or drivers, but now that I've seen spin-down fail on AMD, Intel, VIA and NVIDIA chipsets, it's clearly a Microsoft issue. =O(

Hoak is right. This is a problem with Win7. I have an HP XW9300 with Win7-64 Ultimate, two IBM U-160 SCSI drives attached for data and a WDC SATA drive for boot. The U-160 drives are noisy and I don't need them most of the time. They spin down after 15 minutes in WinXP SP3, Ubuntu 10.04 x64, Ubuntu 9.10 x64. But when I boot the Win7 partition (second primary partition on WDC, controlled by GRUB), they never spin down. Tried HDDScan, but they spun right back up.

While useful information, this is not an answer. Arthur & Brian need to read a little more. This is a problem in Windows 7.