What is waking up my HDD(s)?

[psolord]

Hello.

So I have many HDDs in my system and since I do most of my jobs with my SSDs, I have set the HDDs to sleep after 20mins, both for energy saving and HDD life improvement. However during the day, I hear many spin ups, which is not good for the life of the HDDs. Not all of them spin up of course. I think it must be my gaming drive that does that mostly.

So I want to know, is there a utility that can tell me which HDDs are sleeping and which are not? Also I'd like to know which program or service made the HDD to wake up. I am thinking something like a util that is minimized in the minimized in the system tray and when I click it a bar will pop up, showing all drive letters with green color for the on-line ones and red color for the off-line ones. Or something like that, you get my drift.

I know that by bringing up task manager and clicking on the performance tab, instantly shows which HDDs are offline. However this process triggers all HDDs to wake up. I have tried using HDD Sentinel, but the problem is that it queries the HDDs to show the required data and this query makes the HDDs to wake up. I don't want that.

thanks

PS OS Windows 10 Pro, i5 8600k, z370 Extreme 4 with latest BIOS.

 

[Lordhumungus]

Is it possibly Windows Defender doing a scan?

 

[psolord]

Well I use Kaspersky Internet Security, but I have disable all of it's automated/scheduled taks. I do all scans manually. The system is clean however. I am quite cautious.

Still, the question remains. Is there an app that can actually log all disk activities with program names that have accessed them?

 

[Lordhumungus]

Maybe give this thread a shot to see if it's helpful? Specifically the post about Sysinternals Process Monitor.

 

[eton975]

Might be Windows caching things on the drive. You can disable this by right clicking on the drive in Windows Explorer > Properties > click on the Hardware tab > Click on the drive you want > Properties > Change Settings > Policies > see if any of the two options here are enabled.

 

[Ketchup]

If you don't mind, post a screen shot of your task manager (full view) then next time you notice this happen.

 

[psolord]

Maybe give this thread a shot to see if it's helpful? Specifically the post about Sysinternals Process Monitor.

That was really helpful.

I did include all my drives in the filtering to see what's going and lol wtf windows is crazy man. What is it doing with my drives. It's always accessing stuff all around.

The main culprit seems to be originwebhelper.exe which was accesssing my G: drive which is my main gaming drive. I think this must have been the one I've been hearing spinning up. I disabled originwebhelper and we'll see I guess.

Also why is firefox accessing my steamVR folder, wtf?

Lots of investigation needs to be done, but I think I'm on the right track.

 

[Lordhumungus]

Oh Origin. I am so happy I no longer have to work on that garbage professionally.

Firefox has some WebVR stuff. There was an issue at one point where launching FF would actually also launch SteamVR. Disabling WebVR may help.

Glad that post was helpful though.