Do hard drives go into sleep mode

[joji]

I don't have sleep setting on my system preferences bu once in a while I get the spinning beachball in protools 8.0.3cs2 and i hear one of my hard drive start spinning up as if it were asleep. Is this normal or is there some setting that is doing this.

If all my samples from Kontakt etc are streaming this is not good. I noticed it happending when I reactivated plugins

thanks

[tlennon]

You may have auto save enabled.

[joji]

I have auto save off. so i its not that. it has to be something else. do western digiatal drives have any kind of auto shutdown on there drives. i erased the drives and reformatted them when i got them
thanks

[Sean Russell]

I've seen Seagates in the cheap grey chassis spin down when idle - and some USB drives that clients have brought me for backups. I hate both. I have a total irrational hatred for anything WD, but it seems some drives' chassis have this 'feature' - I'm guessing it's better for the environment or some kind of energy-saving deal.

[joji]

i think that is is it. isnt protools always scanning drive s when you are working. and if one is dormant and has to spin back up then it can choke the system?

[albee1952]

Lots of the "green" drives do have spin down or speed reduction and are bad for use with any DAW.

[John_Toolbox]

Originally Posted by Sean Russell

I have a total irrational hatred for anything WD

+1. I loathe WD as well. Every WD drive I've had failed prematurely. They also tend to be noisy, at least the ones I've had.

[TimNielsen]

The Seagate 1T and 1.5T 7200 rpm drives up until very recently had a firmware bug that would cause them to spin down for about 10 seconds every 10 minutes or so.

I have four 1.5T ones in my MacPro, and when I first got them, saw this problem a lot. A new firmware squashed the bug, but if you're running Seagates, this could be the issue.

I upgraded my firmware on all four drives and haven't had any problems since.

Just a thought.

[joji]

Hi
That is crazy. the drive that is doing that spin down and up is my seagate 2terabyte. do i have to reinitialize the drive to update the firmware.?

[TOM@METRO]

I'm seeing this more and more with the move to green. The WD Black drives have been very good so far.