My Secondary SATA HD Never Idle...

My secondary SATA HD is never in idle and keep active all the time when I don't do any reading or writing.. This causes overheating problem might shorten the life of HD. SMART temperature shows the secondary HD always hotter than the primary HD. Obviously the WinXP in the primary HD doing all the reading and writing should be hotter than should-be-idle cool Secendary HD. This is I think in WinXP task job that gets access the secondary HD all the time automatically that I did not manual do. I think the solution is to stop WinXP automatic task job but I don't know which task job list in Administrative Tools-- Services.
I have to go through each of 40 automatic job task lists....

Anyone knows the right quick solution for this?

wrote:
My secondary SATA HD is never in idle and keep active all the time when I don't do any reading or writing.. This causes overheating problem might shorten the life of HD. SMART temperature shows the secondary HD always hotter than the primary HD. Obviously the WinXP in the primary HD doing all the reading and writing should be hotter than should-be-idle cool Secendary HD. This is I think in WinXP task job that gets access the secondary HD all the time automatically that I did not manual do. I think the solution is to stop WinXP automatic task job but I don't know which task job list in Administrative Tools-- Services.
I have to go through each of 40 automatic job task lists....

Anyone knows the right quick solution for this?

You could use Sysinternals.com Process Monitor and see if
something is actually accessing the drive.

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/...processmonitor

It can monitor events such as Readfile, Writefile, Createfile.
The path to the file is available on each line of that type.
Process Monitor uses the ETW tracing system the OS provides.
The same tracing system is used by Windows Performance Analyzer
for charting system activity. ETW is available from early boot,
until shutdown completes, and can be used by various tools to
trace boot up or shut down activity. I think even ProcMon has
some option for boot tracing.

*******

My drives right now are 26C, 27C, 31C, with the highest temperature
being on the biggest drive. The more platters, it's possible this
makes the drive warmer.

To get temperatures like that, the drive bay has direct
cooling, and a fan is fitted on the front of the bay,
blowing onto several 5.25" drive bays. The drives use
3.5" to 5.25" adapter kits.

The oldest of the three drives (26C one) has 31000 hours
on it.

Room temperature is normal right now. So there is little
delta-T.

My other machine, the drives run a bit warmer, as the
machine has an exhaust fan on the back, and cool air comes
from relatively small intake vents on the front.

But the machine I'm typing on has the "deluxe" cooling
system. I don't bother with attempting to use spin-down
software of any sort. Not worth the bother.

*******

There are at least two programs, which leave a service running
that accesses all drives at regular intervals. Some people
use that to prevent their external USB drive from going to
sleep. If you'd installed such a program, it could be
keeping the secondary drive in a higher power state.

*******

The only real "bug" I've seen, is in WinXP, in the treatment
of the C: drive. One day, I could hear a noise coming from
the drive. It was reading and writing the same sector, over
and over again. In a loop. This is the optimizer, the one that
moves prefetch files to optimal locations, a feature of WinXP.
Only, the math was broken, and was causing the program to
move a file back to where it came from. The solution to that
one, was to move some files around, which changed the decision
the prefetch optimizer was making, and it was then happy to
leave the disk alone. The "bug" is not cured, and it could
happen at any time in the future. I just have to listen for it.

No such behavior happens on data partitions.

*******

The coolest running drives:

1) Helium filled. Both Western Digital (HGST) and Seagate
now make helium drives. The drive is welded shut, to hold
the helium inside. Helium has lower "wind resistance"
when the platter rotates, so the motor needs less power.
And helium is also a slightly better heat conductor.
Normal drives just use the same air as is in the room,
as normal drives have a "breather hole". The helium drives
don't breathe. Atmospheric pressure changes have no effect
on a helium drive, as the helium only stays in if it is
tightly shut.

2) A 5900 RPM drive probably runs a degree or two cooler
than a 7200 RPM drive.

3) Aim to use single-platter drives if you can.
For example, modern 500GB drives use a single platter.
In fact, a single platter now can hold 1TB, and soon,
the 500GB drives will disappear, to be replaced by the
1TB one as the "smallest drive" for sale.

The old Maxtors I have, run a bit hotter than my
newer drives. But they're so old, they have ribbon
cables rather than SATA.

*******

My drive bay cooler is better than this one. They used to
make bay coolers with 40mm fans, which would be as noisy
as hell. My bay cooler is a 120mm with a custom metal frame
to hold it to the computer. And it runs at a relatively low
RPM. 40mm fans are a bad noise/airflow tradeoff, giving
mostly noise, with little airflow. This may look attractive,
but you can build a better quality solution yourself.

http://img.dooyoo.co.uk/GB_EN/orig/0/7/3/5/4/735493.jpg

Paul

wrote in part:
My secondary SATA HD is never in idle and keep active all
the time when I don't do any reading or writing.. This

Have you turned off file contents indexing? On the MS-Win
Properties window for each drive underneath the pie chart
there is a check-box (default clicked) to allow files to have
their contents indexed. I cannot imagine any useful purpose,
but could easily see it causing disk activity.

-- Robert

On Tue, 13 Sep 2016 23:38:26 -0700 (PDT), wrote:

Anyone knows the right quick solution for this?

I setup my swap files to a platter drive. If there isn't one, for a
try, then maybe try a ramdisk, similarly, if possible from system
memory reserves.

Bear in mind longevity can be rhetorical - although I also like the
appearances of planned and thought-out system ordering - and kept a
token plattered drive, besides, for that contigency. (Actually
there's two, small dedicated logical/mechanical partitions, I use for
different Windows OS versions - OS installs respectively of course
"floating" in SSD involatile memory.)