I've recently built a PC out of old parts I had lying around, with the intent of turning it into an console emulation system plugged to a TV.
The issue is, the ridiculously old hard drive in it (Quantum Fireball EX 10.2A 10gB) is very loud. Now with this being emulators, I was planning on just having a script to copy them over to a ramdisk on boot (and back to the disk before shutting down obviously), and turning off the hard drive in software as soon as possible. Problem is, it just doesn't seem to work: when setting "Turn off hard disks" in power options in windows control panel to 3 minutes (which is the lowest setting on my system), it seems to need to wait much longer than those 3 minutes (usually 10-20) to actually spin down the hard drive, and it randomly spins up after a few minutes when that happens.
Now I figured there might be some software/services/whatever running in the background, trying to write to disk, effectively making it spin up, so I wiped it all and did a clean Win2K install. I didn't install any drivers, patches, anything. Just went straight in power options and set it to turn off after 3 minutes. It still took longer, and it still randomly spinned back up after a few minutes. I then installed all drivers, to make sure that ACPI power management was working properly. (you never know...) And sure enough, it works... Suspend, Hibernation, etc. all work properly as they should.
I then decided to wipe it out and try installing Windows 98SE on it. Just to see if it wasn't something NT related that made it dump data to disk periodically. Still, I get the exact same behavior on windows 98: hard drive taking longer than the requested 3 minutes of idle time to power down, and then spinning back up randomly despite nothing happening that I can tell.
I'm running out of ideas here. Did anyone try something similar, with better results than mine?
For reference the system specs are as follows:
Abit-VA6 (Via Apollo Pro 133 + 686A, latest bios)
Pentium3-650 o/c'ed to 866
2x128mb pc133 sdram running at cas3
Unknown Noname Brand Geforce FX5200 AGP 128mB
Quantum Fireball EX 10.2A 10GB HD
Sony 500A DVD-+RW
Random Cheap Realtek 8139NIC
Enermax 300W EG301P-V
The issue is, the ridiculously old hard drive in it (Quantum Fireball EX 10.2A 10gB) is very loud. Now with this being emulators, I was planning on just having a script to copy them over to a ramdisk on boot (and back to the disk before shutting down obviously), and turning off the hard drive in software as soon as possible. Problem is, it just doesn't seem to work: when setting "Turn off hard disks" in power options in windows control panel to 3 minutes (which is the lowest setting on my system), it seems to need to wait much longer than those 3 minutes (usually 10-20) to actually spin down the hard drive, and it randomly spins up after a few minutes when that happens.
Now I figured there might be some software/services/whatever running in the background, trying to write to disk, effectively making it spin up, so I wiped it all and did a clean Win2K install. I didn't install any drivers, patches, anything. Just went straight in power options and set it to turn off after 3 minutes. It still took longer, and it still randomly spinned back up after a few minutes. I then installed all drivers, to make sure that ACPI power management was working properly. (you never know...) And sure enough, it works... Suspend, Hibernation, etc. all work properly as they should.
I then decided to wipe it out and try installing Windows 98SE on it. Just to see if it wasn't something NT related that made it dump data to disk periodically. Still, I get the exact same behavior on windows 98: hard drive taking longer than the requested 3 minutes of idle time to power down, and then spinning back up randomly despite nothing happening that I can tell.
I'm running out of ideas here. Did anyone try something similar, with better results than mine?
For reference the system specs are as follows:
Abit-VA6 (Via Apollo Pro 133 + 686A, latest bios)
Pentium3-650 o/c'ed to 866
2x128mb pc133 sdram running at cas3
Unknown Noname Brand Geforce FX5200 AGP 128mB
Quantum Fireball EX 10.2A 10GB HD
Sony 500A DVD-+RW
Random Cheap Realtek 8139NIC
Enermax 300W EG301P-V