winamp sound skips / hangs with energy save hard drives
 

Winamp sound skips / hangs with energy save hard drives. I believe this is caused by the OS freezing while it waits for hard drives to spin up when it wants to access them. My problem is that since neither the OS system disk or the disk the mp3s reside on is spun down, shouldn't it be possible to use this energy saving feature for the other disks?


I'm trying to reduce the amount of energy in the computer box that my fans need to cool. One of the paths is turning off unused hard drives. The windows XP system runs on a mirrored raid and the mp3s are stored on this same drive that is not shut off. Some other drives, containing movies and other stuff are shut off. When the OS is allowed to turn these extra disks off, I get around three second long skips / freezes in winamp sound. Setting the disks to always on removes the problems with winamp sound.

Specs:
Mobo: Gigabyte ga-965p-ds4
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo
Memory: 1 GB
System HD: Mirrored raid: Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 150 Gb, Sata
Extras: Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 (2*300 Gb, 1*750 Gb) Sata (these are the ones that I want to spin down when unused)
All HDDs connected to the Intel IHC8R.
Soundcard: M-audio revolution 7.1 (pci) / Asus Xonar DX (pci-e) (latest, and earlier drivers)
OS: Windows XP pro (sp2 / sp3)
Winamp: 5.54 and earlier versions about a year back, clean installs with no extra plugins.

Increasing the direct sound buffer does not seem to affect the problem. I understand that the obvious solution is to keep all drives on, but I'm hoping to slow down some fans if I can bring the temperature down. That box is about to levitate any minute. :igor:

Ok, to add to the behavior, I did some testing with other programs as well. The same freezes happen with videofiles and videoplayers so the issue is not a problem with winamp. The issues is solely OS and hardware.

I still would like to solve it.
Anyone have any ideas?