Archival HDD constantly starting up for no reason

[RejZoR]

I have 2 SSD's in my system, 1x 4TB NVMe that's main drive, 1x 2TB SATA that's my old drive that I use for bulk stuff and I also have 8TB HDD that I just use to dump data on that I don't need with fast access. Nothing is installed on HDD, just bulk stored data.

I can be working in Paint.NET editing photos from one of SSD's and suddenly I hear HDD spin up. Why? Why would system wake that drive up when I have nothing active on it?! You'd think HDD would just sit there and be in suspended state until I'd actually try to write something on it, but no, it keeps waking up for some stupid reason.

 

[Ahhzz]

I have 2 SSD's in my system, 1x 4TB NVMe that's main drive, 1x 2TB SATA that's my old drive that I use for bulk stuff and I also have 8TB HDD that I just use to dump data on that I don't need with fast access. Nothing is installed on HDD, just bulk stored data.

I can be working in Paint.NET editing photos from one of SSD's and suddenly I hear HDD spin up. Why? Why would system wake that drive up when I have nothing active on it?! You'd think HDD would just sit there and be in suspended state until I'd actually try to write something on it, but no, it keeps waking up for some stupid reason.

I saw something about that just the other day.... it's a Windows thing, can't remember if I found a regedit to remove it, or if I just decided to ignore it... lemme check my notes....

edit: I think I tracked it down to the indexing process.

 

[RejZoR]

I saw something about that just the other day.... it's a Windows thing, can't remember if I found a regedit to remove it, or if I just decided to ignore it... lemme check my notes....

edit: I think I tracked it down to the indexing process.

I've checked Indexing settings and only Start menu and user profiles folders are included in the indexing process.

 

[chrcoluk]

Speculation.

Background service or scheduled task polling the drive.
Explorer window open with drive visible.
Program running that wants to access drive.
Indexing service (already mentioned).
Automatic swap configuration enabled swap on drive.

 

[Dr. Dro]

It's always a good idea to physically disconnect cold storage that isn't in use, IMO

 

[DaemonForce]

A running program that is polling the drive
Some open file manager polling the drive
Task scheduler spinning up for backup/cleanup service
Windows Storage Service being spun up to do something to the drive
Network activity (samba/iSCSI/other) asking for something on the drive

I keep my HDDs in a Windows Server 2016 environment and only need to worry about a running program, Storage Service and network.
You most likely have something way more obvious going on like an app in the foreground asking for this and that.

 

[Frick]

How often does this happen? Hourly? Daily? Several times per hour/day?