Question Drive never seems to stop being accessed

[wpshooter]

I have a 2TB HItachi SATA hard drive that came in an old Dell Optiplex model 980 desktop that I purchased and the drive seems to work OK, however it is constantly "always / never stops" making a sound/noise like it is being accessed (either reading or writing).

Is this normal for this brand and model drive ?

I have had Sata drives in the past of different brands and models that did not constantly make sound like this one does.

Thanks.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Well, there's at least a couple of possibilities. If you can find a detailed spec. sheet on that particular drive, you can find out if it implements "Seek to Improve Reliability", in which case, while idle, it will automatically seek all over the drive, to even out the "wear".

The other possibility, is idle-period disk-maintenance activity from Windows 10. It likes to do a lot of stuff on your PC, when it thinks that you're not using it. (Cracking codes for the NSA? I've seen a PC that was "idle" suddenly pin all 6C/12T at 100%, I mean, REALLY SLAM the CPU cores at idle. Not malware. Windows 10. Probably, ever since _NSAKEY, NSA and MS have been buddy-buddy.)

Edit: I mean, in general, Hitachi drives, even their consumer-oriented models, are fairly loud, I would say, louder than most other brands and models, with the exception of WD Black HDD, due to their server-oriented design heritage.