Don't forget Indexing. And, if you are connected to the Internet, some programs interact on a time schedule.
Yea, those are possibilities, too.
But indexing is off by default except for the user profile folder which is usually on the boot drive and not a storage drive. Similarly, most programs that do periodic things don't touch storage drives, either. Except maybe a malware protection program--I guess that's a potential possibility.
Something else to check is the Task Scheduler. That's where WU is set to run once every day, but it can't be disabled from there. (I tried; if I disable or delete the daily task, it gets automatically resurrected in short order, and trying to disable what I suspect is the watchdog task that does the re-enabling doesn't work because administrators don't have the privs--only the "SYSTEM" user can modify it--which is why I ended up just disabling the WU service instead.) There's also the automatic maintenance task which, among other things, does a CPU-intensive memtest in a regular basis (but only when the computer is idle, and it stops the instant I move the mouse or tap the keyboard), but that didn't seem to do anything to spin up storage drives, at least not on my system. And there are a gazillion other things in the Task Scheduler, too, so it's probably easier to have procmon point a finger for you.
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