[Honeywell]

I've got a Gateway laptop that's almost 2 years old now. In the settings I've configured it to power down the hard drive after an hour. Well after the monitor shuts off, and the HD *should* be powered down, I can still hear the thing working and the little status light is still blinking away telling me the HD is in use. Is there something wrong here?

I usually keep the thing on 24/7 but lately I've been trying to power it down more at night because of this. I don't want my HD to go, and if it's continually reading/writing I'm sure it won't last long.

This something I should worry about or is it normal?

 

[D_D]

It will only turn it off if it has been idle for 1hr. If any program you have running is accessing to the disk every so often it may never be idle for an hour or it will start the HD back up when the program trys to access it.

It's proberly some innocent program like anti virus software or some other utility program.

If you are not using it why not turn it off completly?

 

[Honeywell]

Originally posted by D_D
It will only turn it off if it has been idle for 1hr. If any program you have running is accessing to the disk every so often it may never be idle for an hour or it will start the HD back up when the program trys to access it.

It's proberly some innocent program like anti virus software or some other utility program.

If you are not using it why not turn it off completly?

I have AIM, MSN Messenger, McAffee, and ZoneAlarm running; those are the only things I would think would be accessing the disk.

I leave it running all the time because it takes too long to start-up I can hibernate it which eliminates the start-up time and stops the disks from reading/writing, but then when I wake it up I end up having to restart it anyways because it doesn't detect the wireless internet signal for some reason.