Software to stop windows accessing HDDs? (unncessarily!)

[mb2]

Is there any software to stop windows accessing hard drives so often? (to stop them being turned back on when in standby)
for example;
when accessing the recycle bin all my hard drives spin up.. and sometimes when opening my computer.. (however, sometimes i can go into a drive without it spinning up until i go deeper into the directory structure)

IIRC, it may be possible to change the recycle bin location or something, or disable it on some drives?.. idk

and is it possible to cache the directory structure/ 'toc' so that u could browse a hard drive, and not have it spin up until u try to access a file.
i'm sure i've seen the ability to adjust the amount of caching of the directory structure etc on some 'tweaking' software before.. perhaps this could be (ab)used for this purpose?

FYI the spinning up i'm refering to is not the windows drive, and its particularly re: w98se if it makes any diff.

and how about shutting down; is there any way to stop that cuz it seems so stupid when i shut down that it spins up the drive/s just to turn it off right after.

edit: also how about any software to turn off the HDD instantly? i tried 'HDsleep' but it locked up my machine whenever run and i needed to boot in safe mode to stop it

[mrochester]

I'd love to know if such a thing exists. The momentary pause as the drive spins up is annoying too, even though you are not trying to access it! I too can do all the things you mention (can sometimes browse through my storage drive without it spinning up). I can also sometimes play a few MP3s without the drive spinning up, then midway through a song, it'll pause as the drive turns on.

[inti]

I stopped Windows using the hard disks by turning off the "Indexing Service" - find it under 'Services' in Computer Management (in Windows XP) and set it to Disabled.

You should also look up (google) how to switch off 'Last Accessed Time' as the way that works is it monitors your disk accesses and after approximately 1 hour of inactivity it updates all the 'Last Accessed Time' entries on disk.

NB the above may not be enough to stop Windows accessing your primary Windows drive, it works for second/third etc hard drives though.

I don't know how to fix that 'spin-up at shut-down' thing - I'd love to stop that, I agree it seems so stupid when the drive is happily spun down already.

[PhilgB]

Get TweakUI 2.10 and under the 'General' settings there is a check box for 'Optimize hard disk when idle' that is on by default. I always uncheck it.

TweakUI

Phil

[scruzbeachbum]

Norton GoBack was my disk thrashing culprit. Drove me crazy - so I uninstalled it.

[mb2]

EWF may help here.. (with XP)
its 'enhanced write filter' and can make the drive seem to be read-only to the OS, stopping needless writes.. i guess the question is are most of the accesses reads or writes?..

obviously u'd need a separate OS partition..

[alleycat]

Found an interesting how-to on using EWF with XP:
http://www.mp3car.com/vbulletin/showthr ... adid=37078