My Disc Drives Keep Spinning Up

[cthulhuiscool]

Hi guys, new to this particular forum, though I've been involved over at hardforum for a while, figured I'd run this recent issue by you guys.

I just got a new rig thew it together but I've been having some issue with the hdds. Occasionally they seem to pause accessibility and I can hear them spinning up as if the computer is booting again. It isn't all at once, just one at a time and only ever 1-2 hrs of computer or so, usually when I do something which would scan them or something like that (run auslogic disc defrag, attempt to format one, ect) but sometimes just happens randomly like I'm listening to music off that drive and it freezes or something like that. I have 4x 500gb hitachi deskstars in it, they are kinda old (made in late 2007) but I would expect they to not be at fault, so I'm wondering what could cause this issue and of course how to fix it?

PC specs:
i5 3570k
biostar tz77b
Antec enthusiast 650w psu
AMD HD 4870

I do have sata configuration set in the bios as "raid," and for some reason it will not boot under any of the other settings "IDE" and something else. Could this possibly be an issue?

 

[mnewsham]

Have you looked into the power saving settings to see if they are set to shut off after a certain amount of inactivity?

 

[mfenn]

There are two ways to avoid this condition:
1. Don't run any background programs that try to access those other disks.
2. Set your Windows power preferences to never spin down the drives in the first place.

 

[cthulhuiscool]

that seemed to fix it, thanks. And here I was worried I had bum disc drives haha