Second Hard Drive Keeps Turning On then Off randomly

[ToxiicHydra]

Hi, I have a second hard drive in my PC so I would have 2 TB instead of 1 but when im just reading something I hear my hard-drive turn on the a few seconds to a few minutes later it would turn off, while this is barely noticeable while trying to listen to it, can not hear when gaming or something, and it doesn't effect performance at all, also using Windows 10, just worried that it my hurt my hard drive in the long run. Just need to know if it will damage the hard drive as I open programs up on the other drive it sounds like it turns on the when I close the window the hard drive turns off again. Thanks

 

[Nerdtweak]

Your Hard Drive should be fine, they are generally silent, but every now and then they will tend to speed up if they're in use in the background!

 

[bailojustin]

No there are no problems with that, its just the harddrive reading and writing information to the disks. thats why it happens when you open up programs. your older HDD prob has a few surface issues, you can chkdsk for errors and bad sectors. this can take time though but this fixes and issues on a HDD caused by programs and other services.

Physical contact with forces that exceed 150G of lateral force will destroy a harddrive, Kicking a computer or bumping a harddrive while its spinning is a much easier way to damage it as it is more prone to damage when on then off.

In your power settings you can change the harddrive on time, to turn off after a certain amount of time.

So no it will not damage your harddrive, thats a normal spin up and read after opening a program. the more damaged the sector the more noise and passes it has to make to retrieve the data in that specific sector.

Thats why when HDDS have bad sectors they can corrupt the files because they cannot be read, this will also affect benchmarks and read/write times.

 

[CountMike]

If you're using Windows, you can set drives power saving to "Never" in Power management > Advanced.