Secondary HDD not turning off

Hey guys,

I upgraded from Win 7 Pro to Win 10 Pro yesterday and so far everything works great, the only problem is that my secondary HDD always stays on.
I have a 128GB SSD as my main drive and an 750GB HDD as my secondary drive for games, pictures and stuff. Since the latter runs at 7200rpm and is quite loud and my laptop is otherwise pretty much completely silent (when I turn the fan on stealth mode) I had created a power profile for studying that turns off hard drives after 1 minute of not using them and with windows 7 that worked just fine.
Now though, my secondary HDD never turns off. I checked task manager and ressource monitor and found that my pagefile was on my secondary so I moved that to my SSD, but now it still doesn't turn off, even when Task manager and ressource manager tell me nothing has accessed it for several minutes.

Do you guys have any other idea what might be causing this or how to fix this?

Thanks in advance!

Just registered to say that I'm having exactly the same problem. Set the HDDs to power down after one minute in the power options which worked perfectly in Windows 7.

I find that it powers down briefly after the operating system is restarted but then powers up again after about 5 minutes and stays on. Sometimes it will turn itself off again after a while and sometimes it won't. It doesn't sound like it’s actually doing anything but I can hear it spinning.


I use the HDD as a backup drive for my SSDs (scheduled daily, not on demand) but I'm going to be disconnecting it if this continues.


I'm guessing that some service must be activating them…

Hello! Another one here with spin down problems. I have an Intel NUC with an mSATA SSD as OS disk and a WD scorpio blue 2,5" as secondary drive, spindown set to 1 minute. Occasionally it spins down, but not within 10 minutes. And often I find the disk to be spinning (it overpowers the fan noise quite a lot) when I haven't used the NUC for several hours or a day. Prior to windows 10 I had windows 7 and it always spun down after a minute. The driver for the WD disk is from June 21 2006, isn't this odd? I don't think the blue line was introduced until 2009.

mertzi said:

Hello! Another one here with spin down problems. I have an Intel NUC with an mSATA SSD as OS disk and a WD scorpio blue 2,5" as secondary drive, spindown set to 1 minute. Occasionally it spins down, but not within 10 minutes. And often I find the disk to be spinning (it overpowers the fan noise quite a lot) when I haven't used the NUC for several hours or a day. Prior to windows 10 I had windows 7 and it always spun down after a minute. The driver for the WD disk is from June 21 2006, isn't this odd? I don't think the blue line was introduced until 2009.

hmm so maybe this is a WD issue? My secondary HDD causing the problem is also a WD, black line.

So my HDD finally turned off for a while today so I started the ressource manager to monitor whatever might wake it back up and when it did spin up again (without me opening anything) I found this:

Does anyone know what that runtime broker is and why it's accessing my picture folder?

Yeah I've already had the same idea. I didn't want to exclude pictures from my hdd from the app because what would be the point of having it then, but what I did do 10 minutes ago is deactivate the live tile (didn't realise it was active before because it never showed anything) in the start menu and that seems to have done the trick - my hdd powered down soon after and hasn't turned on again so far!