- May 19, 2011
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Like many people I have a boot SSD and a HDD which I use for storing personal data on (the kind of data where I/O performance makes little difference in loading said data).
Like many people I notice the telltale sound of the HDD spinning up, and it often happens when I'm doing something that does not conceivably require access to that drive, like when I've been playing a game for half an hour that is installed on the SSD.
While there are a few things one can do to stop an internal drive from unnecessarily spinning up, such as not installing apps on it or storing data that one regularly wants to access, ensuring that the drive isn't being indexed by Windows, or simply disabling the powering down of HDDs due to an idle timer, it seems to me that both Windows and some software engages in practices that aren't conducive to stopping a problem like this without a (probably) significant compromise.
I'm posting this thread because I wonder whether anyone here has made any significant strides in curbing or stopping this problem, but my overall impression is that it is extremely difficult to stop if one wishes to store any kind of data on that drive with a wish to access it from time to time. My guess is that between Windows keeping a list of recently opened files (and it wouldn't surprise me if this list was queried periodically), and let's say you have an app that has recently opened a file on said drive and so lists the file and path in its recently opened files list, it doesn't matter that the user is not requesting that file right now, but the app in question or OS decides that it ought to query the path for some reason.
I wonder whether disabling indexing altogether as well as any logging of saved files/paths would help reduce the problem significantly, but certainly the latter would constitute a compromise too far, at least for me. Then there's the possibility that third party apps have their own programming to remember certain things, like for example Thunderbird records the last location that a file attachment was copied from in its prefs.js settings file.
I suppose another possibility would be to only buy HDDs that are so quiet that the sound of them spinning up is virtually inaudible, however in a system with an SSD in, that's a pretty low bar to aim for, and likely at the cost of the HDD's performance.
Like many people I notice the telltale sound of the HDD spinning up, and it often happens when I'm doing something that does not conceivably require access to that drive, like when I've been playing a game for half an hour that is installed on the SSD.
While there are a few things one can do to stop an internal drive from unnecessarily spinning up, such as not installing apps on it or storing data that one regularly wants to access, ensuring that the drive isn't being indexed by Windows, or simply disabling the powering down of HDDs due to an idle timer, it seems to me that both Windows and some software engages in practices that aren't conducive to stopping a problem like this without a (probably) significant compromise.
I'm posting this thread because I wonder whether anyone here has made any significant strides in curbing or stopping this problem, but my overall impression is that it is extremely difficult to stop if one wishes to store any kind of data on that drive with a wish to access it from time to time. My guess is that between Windows keeping a list of recently opened files (and it wouldn't surprise me if this list was queried periodically), and let's say you have an app that has recently opened a file on said drive and so lists the file and path in its recently opened files list, it doesn't matter that the user is not requesting that file right now, but the app in question or OS decides that it ought to query the path for some reason.
I wonder whether disabling indexing altogether as well as any logging of saved files/paths would help reduce the problem significantly, but certainly the latter would constitute a compromise too far, at least for me. Then there's the possibility that third party apps have their own programming to remember certain things, like for example Thunderbird records the last location that a file attachment was copied from in its prefs.js settings file.
I suppose another possibility would be to only buy HDDs that are so quiet that the sound of them spinning up is virtually inaudible, however in a system with an SSD in, that's a pretty low bar to aim for, and likely at the cost of the HDD's performance.
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