I recently bought one of your WD2001FASS 2TB SATA harddrives from newegg. Running it on a Asus Sabertooth x58 as a secondary drive for data storage. 980x processor, 6gigs ram, and a SSD OCZ Vertex 2 250gig primary drive, on Windows 7 -64bit SP1.
When accessing the drive to store information there seems to be about a 3-5 second delay before the drive will allow access the first time accessed, after that the drive will work until I let it idle for a period of time, after which I need to wait again. Is there anything that can be done to fix this issue?
By idle I just mean the drive itself isn’t in use, the computer will be functional or functioning, just wont be accessing the secondary drive. Have already set windows 7 to always on state, so it doesn’t hibernate (or even goto a screen saver) seems to be an internal drive power saving feature. Just curious if there’s a fix for it, or if I need to buy another drive.
This spin down mode is hard coded to drive to keep it cool. These drives are not 24/7 drives. There are tools to keep the drive from sinning down. But wouldn’t recommend them as it will shorten drive’s usable life.
If you elect to keep drive spinning all the time with some utility, make sure to provide adequate air flow to cool the drive using a fan.
WD has a WDIDLE utility that sets the APM (Advanced Power Management) levels on older drives, but also works on some newer models. WDIDLE writes nonvolatile changes to the firmware, so WD caution that its effect is unpredictable.
