Question HDD Making Noises When Not In Use

[cadefoster]

Hi All,
I have a 500g Samsung ssd as my primary drive with windows 10 and programs installed, and 2 1tb hdd's as storage drives. Since I built my machine a little over a year ago, I have always noticed my hdd's will sometimes start randomly making noises when i'm not accessing any content from them. If my machine is idle, I will sometimes hear the hdd making noises that sounds like its powering up. I also hear it sometimes when playing a game or running a program. Also, sometimes when I launch a program on my ssd, it sounds like windows is trying to load it from the hdd first. For example: sometimes when i try to launch hwmonitor installed on my ssd, the program will hang for a second before opening and i hear what sounds like one the hdd's loading. Not a major issue by any means, but I'd be curious to figure out what's going on.
Win 10
i7 7700k
16g ddr 4
Asus prime z270
Evga RTX 2080
500g Samsung SSD
2 1Tb HDD's
Corsair 750 Gold Psu

 

[Ralston18]

Some backup operation or update perhaps?

What about an AV scan?

Are there any shared drives, partitions, or folders?

You could try opening Task Manager or Resource Monitor. Open to full screen so you can see as much as possible.

Just let the system sit and watch the open window. You may be able to discover what is executing when you hear the drive(s) making noise.

 

[fzabkar]

Hard drives will perform a background media scan after being idle for some time. This is a firmware function, not software. This feature is intended to preemptively locate and, if possible, repair or replace bad sectors before the OS encounters them.