Hard Drives Won't Spin-Down

[hoak]

I have five Western Digital SE16 WD7500AAKS SATA drives, all of which spin-down at the prescribed interval with BSD, Linux, Microsoft Windows XP, and Microsoft Server 2003 -- but with Microsoft Windows 7 none of the drives will spin down regardless of the time interval set in the power profile.

I've tried disabling everything that might cause Windows 7 to access disks that would prevent these drives from spinning-down, disabled: the Indexing Service, Performance Counters, Task Scheduler, Windows Defender, SuperFetch, and Write Caching -- in fact I've had Windows 7 down to just fourteen Services running, and still my storage drives won't spin down.

Neither am I the only person to experience this issue, there are people on several forums with the same problem including this Feller posting on TechNet that's not making any progress either. I've tried all the trouble-shooting steps discussed on the TechNet forum (and then some) and would appreciate anything anyone here might offer...

Edited February 25, 2010 by hoak

[gosh]

sounds like a bios update. WITH ACPI the OS is control of power options, compared to APM when gave more control to the hardware.

cheers

[hoak]

Well I currently have ACPI enabled, and the latest BIOS version for my board; it seems rather foolish to disable ACPI for an OS like Windows 7 -- especially so considing the drives spin down fine with ACPI enabled with nearly a dozen other operating systems, and a lot of the efficiency I'm seeking will disappear if I disable it...

[DigeratiPrime]

1 What motherboard do you have?

2 What is the driver version for your storage controller?

3 Which architecture are you using, x86 or x64?

4 What is the firmware of the hard disks?