Hard drive making noise

[Gregsvn]

Hello,

i have a 1TB wd caviar green 5400rpm/8mb in my pc as a backup and storage drive. Recently it started making noise which sounds the same as when windows is searching a hard drive. The noise occurs every 10 minutes or so, sometimes more frequently and stops only when you select the drive in My Computer and open a folder or a file on it. The files on the drive are in no way connected to windows and there are no running programs from the drive, i also don't use the drive as a temp drive for any programs. I've tried chkdsk /r /f 3 times and the WD diagnostic tool, it found no bad sectors or other faults, bios settings have been unchanged since i installed it 4 years ago, i've checked the connection cables and the disk itself is working as it should apart from the noise, motherboard is updated via MSI Live update so i doubt drivers are the issue. This is getting increasingly annoying and i'd love it if any of you could find a solution. Here are my specs just in case:

Intel Core 2 Quad Q9400
6GB RAM
WD Caviar Blue 640gb 7200rpm/16mb System Disk
WD Caviar Green 1TB 5400rpm/8mb Backup Disk
ASUS EAH6850 DirectCU OC ( the card is overclocked but the voltage is default)
MSI P35 Neo Mainboard
LC5550 550w Power Supply
Windows 7 Ultimate x64 Service Pack 1

Thanks for any help,

Greg

 

[Gregsvn]

I've also disabled windows search in windows features but with no results.

 

[WyomingKnott]

Windows search was indeed the most likely culprit. There is always automatic defrag, but every ten minutes seems unlikely.

There were several threads this year on finding out which app was doing all the disk IO. I just did a quick search and did not find one to link for you; you might want to find one and see if one particular app or service is the culprit.

Could it be malware? Or are there other machines on your network, and is any part of your drive shared?

 

[Gregsvn]

I'm not using any third party software and auto defrag scheduler in windows is turned off so i doubt that would be it, i also disabled content indexing today but it didn't help. The comupter isn't on a network and the disk isn't shared it's also been scanned so malware seems unlikely. As far as an application or service doing this i'll look into it and check performance monitor the next time it happens. If all else fails i guess there's always the hdd usb dock solution...