i want to find out what triggers my external hard drives to spin up at random times.
Is there a tool to find out what triggers this?
I have defrag turned off for these external drives, so it's not that.
what else in win10 is known to randomly spin up external hard drives?
Sounds like you are leaving external HDDs plugged-in all the time? Is there a need for this? If not then only plug in the HDDs when you need them and unplug them when finished.
Hello @link626,
Have a look at these . . .
> How to View All Automatic Maintenance Tasks in Windows 10
> How to Enable or Disable Automatic Maintenance in Windows 10
> How to Specify Automatic Maintenance Time to Run in Windows 10
Check the Reliability History for entries covering the problem times . . .
> How to View Reliability History in Windows 10
I hope this helps.
Some suggestions as to the cause:
Antivirus scanning the files on the drive.
File History backup running.
Image backup running.
If you open any software that has used files on the drive it will look for files in its history like word
these hdd spin ups are while the pc is idle.
I keep them plugged for convenience, and they are silent.
the drives always had content indexing disabled.
nothing uses these external drives as cache.
Nothing is being written, and these drives are excluded from windows defender.
I never had image backup.
There is just no reason for any queries to these external hdds.
event viewer doesn't show anything.
my only guess is maybe google chrome is doing something?
wish there were a way to log these events.
it's as if Windows just spins up the drives to see if they're alive.
In fact, I just set "turn off hard disk after 1 minute" in power options, and after windows spins up the drive, it spins down after 1 minute, so that suggests Windows doesn't actually need to do anything with these hdds.
We need a sense of direction please
Post #1 "i want to find out what triggers my external hard drives to spin up at random times."
--- How many external HDD's are you using and what is the purpose of each one of them?
--- Please post a disk management screenshot
Moving on
Post #6 "There is just no reason for any queries to these external hdds."
--- There is a reason for whatever "triggers my external hard drives to spin up at random times."
--- Maybe each one of the external HDD's need to be evaluated based on "what is the purpose of each one of them"
"my only guess is maybe google chrome is doing something?"
--- Please explain why you suspect "maybe google chrome is doing something"
"it's as if Windows just spins up the drives to see if they're alive."
--- With whatever is going on, there are reasons the drives spin up.
"In fact, I just set "turn off hard disk after 1 minute" in power options, and after windows spins up the drive, it spins down after 1 minute, so that suggests Windows doesn't actually need to do anything with these hdds."
--- If "Windows doesn't actually need to do anything with these hdds", what are you using them for?
i'm using these drives as persistent storage.
it's a laptop, so i need the extra space sometimes. So I just keep these drives plugged in. They're harmless.
I have 3 external hdds.
I'm guessing google chrome because it is known for installing garbage software and putting entries into task scheduler.
You'd think there would be a simple tool to log I/O so i can see why my external drives are spun up.
one thing i forgot to mention.... when they spin up momentarily, they all spin up simultaneously.
I'm looking for a tool that can find what is triggering this.
I would recommend trying Process Monitor from Sysinternals - but its hardly simple - well, simple to run, hard to filter out what you don't care about so you can see what you want. The bulk of its entries are likely to be registry access, so these can be filtered out. I have in the past noticed that Windows occasionally accesses drive/partitions for no apparent reason - and never bottomed out why.
AFAIK this happens on every Windows PC with all HDDs that Windows recognizes, not just the external ones. AFAIK the only way to prevent Windows from keep spinning them up when not in use is to:
1/ lock all partitions on the HDD, and then
2/ dismount all partitions on the HDD, and then
3/ put the HDD to sleep, and then
4/ put all volumes on the HDD in offline state, and then
5/ (optionally) disable the driver for the HDD. The 'optionally' here is referring to the fact that, on Windows 10 at least, disabling the driver can actually cause the HDD to immediately spin up again.
Why this happens is still unclear to me. (I have been trying to find an explanation for several years, and to no avail.)
The procedure I described above is exactly what revoSleep (freeware) does. See:
revoSleep - Get revoSleep and let sleep your hard disk individually!
Only problem, this handy freeware currently does not support USB. So, I bought the type of powered USB 3.0 hub that uses a mechanical toggle switch on each port, as that lets me individually disable those ports that will not be used for some period. If you, like me, have multiple external USB 3.0 HDDs each one of which uses a wallwart for power, then your best bet will be to, in addition to such a USB hub, also grab the type of power strip that's individually switchable. I am in Europe so, here is an example of an EU version of such a power strip─and that uses both the correct 90° orientation of sockets and enough spacing between the sockets to be able to make multiple wallwarts fit properly:
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