Photoshop spins up HDD for no reason

Silencing hard drives, optical drives and other storage devices

Moderators: NeilBlanchard, Ralf Hutter, sthayashi, Lawrence Lee

Post Reply
Kerosene
Posts: 93
Joined: Wed Apr 23, 2003 5:38 am
Location: Melbourne AU

Photoshop spins up HDD for no reason

Post by Kerosene » Sun Dec 11, 2011 7:38 pm

My E drive (used for backups only) goes to sleep soon after I boot in the morning, and generally stays asleep until I run a nightly backup on shut down.
But every time I open Photoshop (CS5 Extended), my E drive wakes up - even though Photoshop is set ONLY to use my D drive as its scratch disk.
I read somewhere that Photoshop checks all accessible disks, even if they're not selected in preferences. Dunno why. But it does.

Is there anyway I can hide my E drive from Photoshop?
Does anyone know a way to stop Photoshop from spinning up my backup drive?
This is driving me nuts.

Windows 7 x64
C: OCZ Vertex 2 60GB (system drive + applications)
D: WD Green WD10EARS 1TB (scratch disk + storage)
E: SpinPoint F3 1TB (backup drive - asleep all day)

washu
Posts: 571
Joined: Thu Nov 19, 2009 10:20 am
Location: Ottawa

Re: Photoshop spins up HDD for no reason

Post by washu » Sun Dec 11, 2011 8:39 pm

You could write a script that calls diskpart to unmount your E drive (ie, remove it's drive letter) and then another to mount it again. Depending on how your backup software is setup it might be able to call the scripts before and after the backups.

You could also try mounting the drive in a folder on one of your other drives and remove it's drive letter. That way it would only spin up if something accessed that folder.

Post Reply