Hello,
I have installed windows and all of the programs on my SSD. But while using the PC the noisy HDD keeps turning on randomly. Is there any way to make it "start" only when I open it to access some of the files that are stored there?
Not to my knowledge. I'd bet that even if the HDD contained one freshly formatted NTFS volume without any other data on, Windows would still do that. An unpartitioned drive probably wouldn't though
Or a drive that appears to be unpartitioned but has an encrypted volume on it that you only mount when you need it.
There are two problems: If for example you open a File Explorer window, it's going to attempt to enumerate the connected storage devices. File Explorer also has access to the recent items list. Secondly, Windows is rather chatty. Fire up Process Monitor (sysinternals tool) and even if you look at only the file activity going on with a seemingly idle system, Windows basically never stops.
One other bit of oddness with modern versions of Windows is that if you have an internal floppy drive, Windows often likes to query it for no good reason. I think Microsoft just forgot that floppy drives existed and wrote code that queries every storage device connected to the system.
I'm running Linux these days, and I recently swapped out my WD Blue 4TB data HDD with a drive that was capable of APM (because otherwise the distros I've tried won't auto-power-down the drive). The drive doesn't switch on 'randomly' any more, but opening a file manager window will (often? always?) power the HDD up because I've got pinned folders that point to that drive.
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