Keep hard drive from spinning up when idle

Question

I am running a Windows 10 system in which I have a multi terabyte HDD for storage (Brand new 4TB Western Digital Black). Although this drive is obnoxiously loud even when idle.

I have set the Windows spin down time for all drives to 15 minutes and this is functioning fine, but randomly through out the day/night it will spin back up for no reason that I can see.

I have even went as far as using mountvol with the /p switch to unmount the drive totally, but I still notice the drive spin up once in a while even when unmounted.

Is there a way to see what is causing the drive to come back from idle and/or a way to make the drive permanently stay in a idle non-rotating state unless specifically used? I would of imagined that unmounting the drive would cause Windows to not be able to access it, but some how it is still spinning up.

I've been working on a solution for close to a month and it is almost coming down to purchasing a external SATA cradle with a dedicated on/off switch to cut power from the drive to make it stay quiet.

Thanks.

Solution

You should get the tool "Process Monitor" from Sysinternals. With a few filters set, you can filter out anything unrelated and just look for the accesses on your hard disk which you don't want to spin up.

I'm currently having the same problem, with the Windows 10 Creator's Update from this month, it's even gotten worse. Maybe once an hour or every two hours, my other HDDs are spun up, for no apparent reason. HDD timeout is set to 20 minutes, but that doesn't mean much if they randomly spin up again later!

I'll have to do the same and look with Process Monitor what actually causes this. It's most likely something within Windows like svchost, which will be hard to prevent.

Comments

[Wiffzack]

You can try to lower the noise level with hdparm. Here some documentation

[Christopher Hostage]

I assume that "multi terabyte HDD for storage" means you have a separate boot disk. Your boot disk will be accessed frequently in Windows 10, unfortunately. If you only have the one disk, keeping it idle will be difficult.

[Christopher Hostage]

'Indexing Options' will let you uncheck the indexing for the D: drive or whichever letter you have assigned. Of course, then you won't be able to hit the Windows key and quickly search for items by name in that drive.