why is my HD spinning all the time?

[rdlaing]

Hey there,

on my

WD 80 gig with 8 megs cache
windows xp
512 megs RAM
athlon 2100xp
asus a7v333 via chipset mb

my hd light flickers a lot and is on a lot. It does spin down after 3 minutes of idle because I set it that way under 'Power Usage Options." But I thought that if the memory is not full and things are loaded into ram, that it doesn't need to access to HD all the time.

I have file indexing turned off too, by the way.

I have Office 2000 installed -- is that the problem? Do I need to change the page file/virtual memory settings (it is set to 1000 right now -- twice my RAM)?

If I don't sort this out I am re-formatting and seeing exactly when in the reinstallation of all my software it starts to spin all the time; i suspect it is software related.

It concerns me because of wear and tear on the HD, and also it increases system noise considerably.

thanks for the help!

--RD

[gunrunnerjohn]

My XP system never seems to allow the drive to spin down either, and every once in a while, there's a flurry of activity, which I believe is the recovery point processing. :)

[glc]

I would advise you to leave it running all the time, all that starting and stopping is harder on a drive than constant running.

[rdlaing]

good point glc, I'll stop worrying about it.