Why does the HDD randomly spin up at times?

[mroneeyedboh]

This is just a side discussion and something that Ive noticed on this build. Is there a reason the HDD spins up at times on its own? Is it just waking from sleep because of a program ( although I have Firefox loaded on the SSD, not the HDD ) being loaded in the background? Or maybe its just a system check thats built into the drive? Can it be turned off so it doesnt spin up randomly unless its accessed?

 

[jaslion]

This is just a side discussion and something that Ive noticed on this build. Is there a reason the HDD spins up at times on its own? Is it just waking from sleep because of a program ( although I have Firefox loaded on the SSD, not the HDD ) being loaded in the background? Or maybe its just a system check thats built into the drive? Can it be turned off so it doesnt spin up randomly unless its accessed?

Anything that needs even the smallest bit of information of the drive will make it spin up. So you can't control it.

 

[JackNaylorPE]

1. Consumer drives are designed with a protective feature called "head parking" whereby the arm / head is parked such that vibration can not cause contact between the head and the platter damaging the drive. When data is read or written, the head must move from that parked position in order to read data off the disk.

2. Most of the data is stored on a rotating disk. The system may need to read or write data to disk even when you are not doing anything ... say for a "timed save". If you open task Manager if System Monitor (in TM, use the View menu to add columns) you can view disk I/O you can see what exe files are doing the reading and writing.

3. When such transfers are needed, anything that needs to be read or written that does not fit in the disk cache will make the drive spin up.

 

[USAFRet]

Just because you are not actively using it at that moment does not mean that the OS is not thinking about doing something with it.

Lots of background processes going on.Indexing, defrag, some other teeny resource it needs to read off that drive...

 

[TMTOWTSAC]

Even things like a save dialogue box will do a polling check to see what drives are available. Antivirus software also commonly wakes up drives when doing background scans. And I've noticed it more often in Win 10 than 7, possibly because of the increased number of programs that check for updates.