hard disk activity

I recently upgraded the hard drive in my a8jm to a 100 gig 7200rpm hard drive. It's fast, but battery life sucks now (about 1h 15min) because it won't ever spin down. I didn't really notice before if the old hard drive was spinning down or not since it was so quiet, but I can tell that the new drive is always in activity with the spinning. I've set the hard drive to spin down after 3 minutes in Power4Gear, but the activity never stops so it just keeps going. I checked the I/O Read/Write/Other in Task Manager, and it seems like the biggest culprits are avp.exe (Kaspersky), explorer.exe, and lsass.exe. I can't really close any of these -- anyone have a solution for this?

 

Make sure Kaspersky is actually not scanning right now, or is scanning your laptop, because that will decrease battery life.

If it is not scanning, just endtask avp.exe for now, and see if your battery life normalizes.

If not, lets further close IE windows, some websites have so much flash and other things running, and can cause your computer to constantly load all these objects.

 

I'm more concerned with getting my HD to spin down if all I need to do is type a Word document, since the constant spinning at 7200rpm kills my battery. Shutting down avp doesn't work, and lsass.exe is a critical process. I've seen posts here about people's HD activity light blinking once every second or so. Is there a fix?

 

The light should always blink, because Windows is always requesting something or other from it. I think you should have a look at what programs are active, and which are using the hard disk. Use the process or elimination to anrrow down the programs. It can be any program, even some that don't usually use the hard disk, can be the culprit. It probably isn't a critical process, as all computers have it and it didn't affect the battery life before, from what oyu have stated.

 

Hm...so basically there isn't any way for the hard drive to spin down? I've noticed the activity light ever since I first started using my a8jm -- it's just more of an issue now that I have a faster hard drive installed.

 

No, the hard disk will slow down when the load on it isn't too much. Windows is always copying and reading from the hard disk, so stoping that is very difficult. That reading and copying should be done at a lower speed than the full 7200 RPM. I think you should check your hard disk settings, because if nothing has changed from the processes that ran before the hard disk upgrade, then I see no reason why thins is happening.

 

So is the problem that the HDD activity lite is always on, or you can't confirm that the spin down happened and your battery life dropped? Upgrading to a 7200 shouldn't have the kind of impact on the battery that you're describing, although it's certain that you will always see a drop with the higher rpm drives - what was your battery time before the swap? Generally, unless the HDD is accessing something one can't ever hear that the drive is spinning because at idle the r/w heads aren't jumping back and forth making noise, so my guess is that your original 5400 drive wasn't spinning down either (inside a laptop case you'll never tell because the idle HD drive doesn't generate enough sound to transmit outside the case; i.e. turn the lcd off and put your ear next to an idle hd enclosure in a notebook when the fan is off - I'll bet you can't tell that it's on). And in some situations, it actually takes more battery power to spin back up the drives than keep them running at idle (physics/inertia and all that).

Is there any other software that is showing consistent high cpu usage in your process listing? That will burn power fast, too. Have you run a full virus scan to be sure that nothing has snuck into your system and is eating resources, or a new background process? Desktop indexing services will also burn a lot if set to short-interval updates.

 

Where in the world did you read that hard drives slow down when the load is low?

 

I didn't change anything except for the hard disk. Not sure where I can access hard disk settings though -- I didn't find anything in the BIOS.

Before the upgrade, I got about 2h 40min of battery life on the "quiet office" setting. The new hard drive shortens battery life by about half. I bring up the spinning issue because I can definitely feel the hard drive vibrations, especially if it's in my lap. It's a low hum and hard to hear, but easy to feel, so I can tell that it's constantly spinning -- hope that makes sense. Are there any settings that let you use a lower rpm while on battery? (Kinda like Speedstep for hard drives, I guess).

CPU usage is normal, no viruses.

Now that I'm listening, I can always hear the HD clicking every 1 sec or so -- it didn't bother me before since battery life was good, but now I just want the new HD to idle so it won't use so much juice spinning all the time.

 

you could try installing Notebook Hardware Control and selecting "enable spin down" in the Hard Disk tab

 

Pretty neat utility -- I'll give it a try. HD is still not spinning down, but I'll see how battery life is tomorrow in class with the max battery setting. I think it's just Windows always accessing my HD at all times.

Thanks for the help guys -- I'll keep digging around for more possible solutions.