windows 7 fresh install keeps parking my hard disk, making things hella slow

[faxon]

So any time i close out of explorer for more than a couple minutes, win7 has started parking my damn RAID1 array im using for storage, and it's making SSD related disk accesses slower as well if they happen to reference something on both drives (like opening any explorer window). at first it wasnt to bad, but now its really starting to bug me, and it's happening frequently enough that it cant be good for my drive. my first install of win7 was an upgrade install, and in vista before that i had never had any issues with it, but now its driving me nuts, and i cant figure out how to turn it off! any help? im apparently incapable of googling for anything at this time of night either, as i keep getting useless results :thumbsdown:

 

[IntelUser2000]

Go follow these instructions:

Control Panel--System and Security--Power Options--Go click on the "Change Plan Settings" for the power setting that's selected for the system--Click on "Change Advanced Power Settings"

There should be "Hard Disk" option. Do "Turn off hard disk after" setting to "Never".

 

[faxon]

thanks, the setting was set to 20 minutes originally, no wonder it was so bad. i would buffer up a 25 minute TV show and then EVERY SINGLE TIME i went to go to the next episode, it would pause while the hard disk spun up, and when i went to a large movies folder it occasionally hung explorer.exe lol

 

[LokutusofBorg]

This very thing was pissing me off to no end a while ago. Would get clicking noises from my hard drive, performance hiccups. Thought my (new) hard drive was going bad. I felt dumb when I found out it was a simple power management setting.

 

[IntelUser2000]

I'm glad the drive power down scheme actually works in Windows 7, but because regular HDDs have spinup time, it makes it annoying when it spins down.

Of course there will be no such thing with an SSD as those times are measured in nanoseconds.