Hard drive turns off after several minutes.

L

limewax

New Member
Hello guys. I've recently replaced my internal HDD in my notebook to a SSD drive. The ODD has been removed, and i put there my old HDD in a caddy.
The problem is: HDD is acting weirdly on Windows 7.
It sometimes gives a weird sound like clicking - not regular, not during sequence data transfer, only when idle, a few times randomly in 3 seconds, mayble once a minute. HDD head parking sound i guess ? Can i somehow disable this ? Is it even safe ? When this drive was the system one, this didn't happen on power plugged in, only when the notebook was on battery but also not so often.
Second problem: HDD is going down after 2 minutes of being idle. It just stops no matter what. Then when I turn on music in Winamp or any other application the disk starts, spins and then the data is avaliable. It sometimes happen even in games - which causes unacceptable lag. This is extremely annoying and shorts the HDD lifetime right ?
So i want to keep this thing powered on. Any way i can do this ?
Notice, that i've already tried advanced power settings -> Hard disk -> Turn off hard disk after -> never (0 minutes) in both textboxes (for battery and plugged in mode).
Any value that i'll put in there takes no effect, which drives me crazy.
I think thats not the hardware fault, on Linux which is also installed near Win7 on main SSD drive, everything works like a charm, no clicking no lagging, HDD stops only when unmounted.

Any idea how i can fix these problems ?

Notebook: Acer Aspire TimeLineX 5830TG
SSD: Kingston V300 120GB sata 3.
HDD: WD BLUE 750 GB sata 2.
Windows 7 professional X64PL MSDN.
Sorry for my poor english :)
 
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When a hard drive is clicking, be prepared to toss it out the window. If you're lucky you might be able to go out and get another drive and make a clone of the hard drive before it completely goes out. But be ready for it to die while you're trying to clone it. Move very important stuff first to a smaller hard drive or SSD, then clone the drive to your new HDD.
 
I wouldn't give up just yet, but clicking is often a bad sign. Try downloading HDTune. Check you disk's SMART data, and also run a scan for bad sectors.
 
So, i have to amaze you guys. SMART status is OK, every test passed, normal. No bad sectors detected. I already copied most sensitive data to another 80GB HDD in case anything goes wrong one day.
 
I guess you're probably right, then; maybe it just has to do with the drive's power control. I don't know enough about that to help you, though, so hopefully another member can. ;)
 
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