External usb floppy constantly seeks / chugs

I'm running windows 10 on a gigabyte 370n-wifi board with a pentium g5400 gold core; it's a fairly modern bios etc. I bought an external usb floppy drive from ebay. It was one of the new ones designed more for legacy support. I would assume the computer is seeing it basically as a usb drive called 'floppy drive' and something on board may be doing the floppy drive read, as opposed to the computer controlling it directly. I noticed it does two odd things for a floppy drive. One, the led is continually on even when it's not actually reading. Two, it makes a 'chug' sound every couple of minutes. I realise that's the drive head jogging and it's quite likely caused by windows re-polling the connected drives; it even does it with file explorer closed. Question is, is there anyway to make it stop doing that other than just unplugging it?

Berton said:

I keep mine because I never know when one of my clients finds a disk and wants to know what is on it, same with the 100MB and 250MB Zip disk.

Hmmm... I might pick up a 3.5" USB floppy drive just for the purpose you mention. Still have my USB Zip drive.

It is probably being indexed or something like that.
Mine does not chug unless a floppy is in the drive, or the File explorer is looking at it.

Settings > Search > Searching Windows > Classic

Make a few adjustments in there to the indexing properties, the A:\ drive may have gotten in there.

Also look at USB properties, and other things that have been mentioned.

Windows 10 still contains the floppy disk driver, it was originally removed from early versions of Windows 10 but after complaints it was put back. I had a copy of sfloppy.sys from Win 8.1 to put back when going to Windows 10 but was not needed.

Format the drive first.
Add yourself as the owner of the drive and take full ownership. Now add yourself again as a user and give yourself full permissions.
Next to delete all other entries of users,admins,system, so you can only see just you in the security permissions. This will secure and lock down the drive, hopefully
See if the thrashing stops, good luck

Experience says otherwise. And it happens more than you think as Berton and the OP noted.

FWIW one of my Win10 installations is on an aging Dell Optiplex tower which came with an internal floppy. The floppy is always having short bursts of activity:

• shortly after boot
• during/after new software installs
• after rearranging desktop cons
• when plugging in a USB mass storage device
• when a Windows update starts

I have taken it as a fact of life and stopped worrying about it.

Old thread, but just noted that I was having similar issues. It was Windows Search. In order to add A:\ to the exclusions, I had to first put in a floppy. Once it was added to the list, it no longer seeks the drive.