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Starting SolidWorks seems to start external hard drive

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Theophilus

Theophilus

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Dec 4, 2002
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Odd thing happening--any options in SolidWorks (or Windows 7) to prevent start-up of SolidWorks from simultaneously starting an external hard drive? This didn't happen previously, but I've recently updated my system and reinstalled Windows 7.

Thanks!

Jeff Mowry
A people governed by fear cannot value freedom.
 
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Thanks for the replies!

First, SW does start if I have the external drive disconnected/shut-down. But that's working now, after I double-checked the backup/recovery settings and set them to an internal drive. They hadn't been set previously, so their default was a random location on the C drive.

I'll try reconnecting the drive and restarting SW to see if it spins up during a start-up. No big deal, but I didn't put SSDs in this system to have to wait for an idle spinning drive to wind up before starting applications.



Jeff Mowry
A people governed by fear cannot value freedom.
 
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Just a shot in the dark: If you have backup software (not SW backup) could it be seeing that some files are changing when SW is starting so it is doing an incremental backup?

Han primo incensus
 
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I don't see any indication that the Windows pagefile has migrated to this back-up drive (was added recently, after all Windows set-up).

I have the Professional version of SolidWorks, so I'm not using PDM, etc. and those are not checked in Tools>Add-Ins as being active. However, what seems to have been originally installed by my computer vendor (SolidBox--great people there) is SolidWorks Premium. Regardless, I'm not using Add-Ins that go beyond what Professional includes.

It seems Photoshop does the same thing, so this is likely a Windows 7 setting/bug/feature, and not necessarily something specific to SolidWorks.

Any ideas?



Jeff Mowry
A people governed by fear cannot value freedom.
 
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Have you tried changing the drive letter assigned to the external drive to something different? I would pick a letter in the middle of no where, J or Q.

You could also use procmon to figure out which executable was accessing the external drive.

Eric
 
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I cleared out the indexing and still have the external drive spin up. I've also confirmed that some other applications do the same thing, so this is most likely a Windows setting and not merely a SolidWorks setting--just need to figure out what it is and how to shut it off until the drive is intentionally accessed. I get similar behavior when waking the computer from "sleep" before logging on.

I'll see if I can figure out how to make use of procmon. Each of the spinning drives are already named Y and Z so they keep the same drive mapping for my back-up application (instead of random letter assignments).

Thanks for all the replies so far!



Jeff Mowry
A people governed by fear cannot value freedom.
 
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I checked the properties of this drive and noticed Windows had the following option checked:
"Allow files on this drive to have contents indexed in addition to file properties"

I unchecked that option, so we'll see what happens as a result. I don't generally use searches for things on my hard drive, since my file system is organized in a way to find just about everything quickly without a search.



Jeff Mowry
A people governed by fear cannot value freedom.
 
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Yes, I could leave it unplugged, but I've got nightly data back-ups scheduled during the early A.M. So if I do that, I'd certainly forget to replug it in (eventually) and miss some back-ups, which could on an outside chance be catastrophic. May work on building up an NAS sometime, but this system seems to work quite well for now.



Jeff Mowry
A people governed by fear cannot value freedom.
 
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I've noticed a similar thing before to you. Only it was more with spinning internal drives up that were spun down. I can think of no valid reason that SW should do this. But it does and it is very annoying and uncalled for. I couldn't find any cause and put it down to some kind of under the hood "phoning home drive scan" style thing. It seems nowadays that software developers have came to the conclusion that they can send or collect/harvest any kind of data from users and its all fine and dandy!

Whats more frustrating is when you have 8 internal drives and they all get forced to spin up coz... SolidWorks! oh the joy.
 
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Thanks for the reply. Still seeing the same thing here, but since it similarly happens when Windows starts, I'm thinking it's ultimately something Windows is doing. I've disabled auto-start of new devices in attempt to cure this, but I don't think that's solved the problem (not quite sure yet).



Jeff Mowry
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