Windows 10 starts on a regular hard disk spinning up.
Windows 10 starts on a regular hard disk spinning up.
Hello from the past, back when Windows XP was around I configured my storage (typically three or more) to power down after two minutes for energy savings. This approach functioned well with Windows 7 and somewhat with Windows 8.1 as well. Especially since SSDs have been around for a while now, they only start spinning up when I actually access them. With Windows 10, however, it refuses to do so. Every roughly thirty minutes the HDDs spin up without cause and then shut down again, only waking up about an hour later. I disabled these partitions in Defender, turned off autodefrag and file indexing. All this isn’t required in Windows 7 for the system to operate smoothly, but definitely not under Windows 10. I can’t allow them to stay active constantly either. These three or more drives are just too noisy, probably due to some internal issues. What exactly does Windows 10 have that causes this regular spinning up? Thanks a lot.
If another person does the same, I have no choice but to discard the internal drives. I was considering moving the hard drives outside the PC into a separate USB enclosure, but not setting it up as a NAS. I doubt this comment will be useful to anyone else.
I rely on an eSATA storage device, which could vary when using USB.
Avoid purchasing additional external USB hard drives; they operate more quietly and tend to be more dependable!
I own two distinct PCs experiencing this problem. One is a newer R5 2600 and the other an older i3 550. The 1156 model moved from Windows 7 to 10 and then back to 7. After switching to the new AMD setup, I tested Windows 7, 8, 8.1, and 10, but only the 7 drivers under 8.1 functioned properly. The older system worked fine with the 7 drivers, but the newer ones didn't.
To conserve energy, you should be aware that hard drives consume only about 5W of power, so turning them off won’t help and may actually hinder file access speed. If you need to monitor your drives, review each program and task in the task scheduler that might interact with storage. Services like BITS or game updaters, as well as certain applications, can also attempt to use your storage. Using tools like ProcMon can help identify issues but will be time-consuming and frustrating. Also, disabling a program’s built-in protection doesn’t stop it from functioning—it just pauses file scanning or virus checks, leaving normal operations unaffected.