HD won't shut down in Win7 power saving mode

[allenrosch]

I'm using Win7 64 Home Premium, with an i5 760 and 8 g of generic RAM.
I have a C drive and D drive, identical Hitachi 1 TB drives, plus a couple of USB drives. My MoBo is a Gigabyte P55 USB3. Recently I noticed that my hard drive was not shutting down as specified in control panel/power settings at 60 minutes. Or at any specified time starting with one minute, etc. I experimented. Everything on this new-ish machine works but for this one oddity. My guess is that some process is running in the background. However, the computer goes to sleep, the monitor turns off, etc. I've tried numerous variations but in every case the HD doesn't shut down automatically. I uninstalled Gigabyte's utilities in case they were getting involved in some processes (lots of energy saving, cooling etc type
utes, including a HD auto-shutdown.) This isn't a killer emergency, but it's a nice feature to have and I'm wondering how to detect the culprit.
BTW, I live in an RV and connect via wifi with a LAN connected router. I usually just leave that on through the night after I've turned off everything else.

Thanks

Art

 

[mfenn]

Try booting a Linux liveCD and running hdparm -y /dev/XXX (where XXX is your drive device probably sda and sdb). This will help you determine if it's a hardware or software problem.

 

[allenrosch]

If I understood your reply I would certainly do it. I know what Linux is but the rest went
zoom! right over my head. Thank you for giving it a shot. For the moment I'm settling for Hibernate. The result is much the same. HDs stop, lights go out and I have to push the power button to "resume" Windows.

 

[mfenn]

OK, well I guess that is one way around the problem! :awe: