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Switch off drives or not

idata
Employee
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I am having problems with a "hanging" system.

I have problems with Windows Media Player, half way through a movie playback I click the X but the player does NOT "die". The movie stops playing but the program just sits there. I can click the X 20 times - NOTHING. There will be a delay and 30 seconds to 2 minutes later the program WILL die. This happens 95% of the time. 5% of the time the players just dies as required.

Out of curiousity I tried the VLC player which, basically, did the same thing.

My, system when I allowed it, would hibernate but very often NOT wake up.

A couple of times a day the system would just "hang".

The system would also hang, at random times, when I move or click the mouse. This is with a cordless mouse/keyboard combo (Logitech) AND with a wired mouse and keyboard (Microsoft).

I am running Windows 7 Professional.

I have 3 RAID mirrors, 4 other drives and an SSD.

I had set set the system to switch the drives off after 15 minutes idle.

I began to suspect that my problems stem from the system trying to wake up the drives when they are sleeping. The Windows Media Player problems were happening when the particular drive WASN'T sleeping too, so go figure!

I have removed the "switch off when idle" setting so my drives run ALL the time. ALL hanging problems have gone! Both movie players work as expected.

I realise it consumes more power with the drives running all the time but I am currently worried whether running all the time is bad for the drives.

Better to switch off when idle or run all the time, from the drives' point of view?

I have researched this but no-one has a definitive answer. Some swear by switching off and some by NOT switching off?

What does this forum think?

Louis

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RGiff
Honored Contributor I
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I leave all my drives on as long as I'm using the machine and I never use Hibernate. But back to the other probelm I had windows 7 64 bit ever since it came out and the Media player has always been bugy , Don't know why it's just bugy I though at first it was because I also have Roxio Pro install which has it's own media player , don't know if that's it or not , But I use the roxio more than the win media player so I will live with till one of them comes out with a patch. Windows 7 service pack one Beta is out now , but I'm going to wait for the complete service pack maybe that will fix the media player???

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