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Old April 20th 17, 06:49 PM posted to microsoft.public.windowsxp.general
Paul[_32_]
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Posts: 11,873
Default WinXP's Power Management Issue

wrote:
Hi,

I use an old IBM Thinkpad T23 laptop with dual boot Win98se or WinXP.
It is on all day long until 4:30PM. Note: WinXP home edition SP2.

When not in use for some time, I will reboot into Win98se because the
"Power Management" will stop the hard disk drive spinning after a selected
period of time. Unfortunately, WinXP's "Power Management" does not
"work" for this purpose.

Does anyone know of a "fix"?

Thank You in advance, John


There are a couple features on drives.

APM - a value of 0xFF is supposed to stop the so-called power saving crap
- the two recent drives i bought, ignore this.

WDIDLE3 - the timer value in the ATA standard, defines the time
until the drive parks the heads. There can be a short
delay, until the OS notices something funny about the
drive state, and it manages to wake it up. Heads should
reload in a second or so, but it seems to take longer than that.

SATA link power state - there are also power states for the links to the
drive. There were problems in the past with this,
requiring regedit, but the topic hasn't come up in
some time.

I have a couple of new drives here, that are ignoring
the APM power byte. Even at 0xFF, they still park the heads.
My drives seem to remain spinning, and I expect the heads
have been placed on the ramp. Checking SMART, the LCC #193
parameter is 1453 parks, in 2811 hours of power-on operation.
Which is not bad, compared to WDC Green drives, but it still
shouldn't be happening.

The time to park the heads on the ramp, can be modified. People
have been doing this on WDC Green drives, using WDIDLE3 utility,
for some time. This would be the open-source Linux equivalent.
This description suggests the change is persistent (ATA commands
come in two types, a change for the current session, or a change
saved for future sessions).

http://idle3-tools.sourceforge.net/

I paid good money for these two drives, which are "Enterprise"
class. And the suckage of Green drives, fills the air... This
is my last WDC drive for a while. The 2TB drive has a known
issue with the spindle motor, which makes a sound during spindown.
An FDC motor has spiral grooves for pumping the working fluid
up the spindle, and the noise I hear, sounds like the
spiral is grinding against the bearing stop. I will be taking
the new drive out of service, and relegating it to backup
storage/scratch disk status (the Junk Pile). Even the early
FDC motors, where only one bearing was "stiff", they didn't make
a noise like that. In the disk drive business, the motors can be
made by a third party, such as Nidec. And the disk makers have
an incoming inspection lab for verifying the motors are OK
(for new designs). Any "issues" that leak through, are "on purpose",
in the "screw the customer" sense.

Anyway, hope that gives you some ideas to work with.

Paul
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