I can't take it - it drives me nuts. Whether I leave everything at default settings or tweak the hell out of Windows 10, I can hear my HDD spinning practically all the time. No, it is not failing, its been doing that for a year and yet to produce a single issue. I don't run OS on it - its a storage drive, nothing runs from it and tied to it. I watch a film on occasion or listen to music, but then close the file. I disabled a ton of services and driver services, and disabled ALL tasks and the system works fine, snappy, excellent - games freaking fly at high FPS, no stutters (although they all run from my SSD's...)! Yet this constant knowledge that my HDD is just doing something when idle freaks me out. All defragmentation/optimization-related tasks and services are off, Maintenance is off, Windows Defender is off, Cortana gone, Shell Experience Host not running. I don't remember this ever happening with any OS other than Windows 10. What could it be? I don't actually see the HDD LED indicator blinking when nothing is running from it (yet I hear it spinning), but I do see it blinking when I play a film from it (which is when I hear more louder spinning), so if we are to believe HDD LED indicator, the IDD is not running or being used when PC is idle, yet I hear it spin when it is idle. I checked all the SMART-related functions, ran every test possible - from quick scan to super low-level scan and all is perfect, but when PC is idle - I can hear HDD spin What's Windows 10 doing to my HDD???
Maybe the use of tracking apps would give you needed info's? You could use NADETECTOR, WHATSRUNNING, or something like that to see what's keep the HDD running. Any advanced TaskManager would be helpful for to get the needed infos. Also, it simply could be that the firmware of the HDD itself has a problem. You could check with HDDGURU if there's is a new Firmware available for your HDD.
Hard disks are supposed to be spinning all the time. Typically spinning hard diks have 30-50 degrees C as temperature range. If your drive falls within that range and everything seems to be fine.... everything should be fine. Some drives have a problem with noise and few models make too much of it. Also run Crystal Disk Info and see if any SMART attributes are red or amber colored. Finally, last resort, try changing your SATA III cable from a brand which has mostly positive reviews.
Less stress on the drive leaving it spinning all the time anyway, spinning down is only for power saving, and only makes sense if you're running on battery Each time you access the drive, and it has to spin up again, it causes unnecessary wear and tear
OK, I will give those things a try - big thanks! For my Power settings I set Hard Drive to turn off after 0 minutes, which means never to turn off. The reason I did it is because if I leave it at 20 minutes, then 20 minutes later I will try to use mY HDD and there will be a good 5-6 second lag before I can open a folder. When that setting is at 0, HDD does not lag at all. Resource Monitor and Task Manager show a very low disk utilization 1-10mb, almost no CPU utilization for basic tasks, and LatencyMon shows 0 page-fault occurencies, even when I play games, which means Windows 10 keeps or tried to keep it all in RAM and not use pagefile. I set Windows 10 to its default for pagefile, where it manages it for all drives on its own. Also, some nights, when PC is turned off completely, my HDD spins, even 3-4 hours after PC has been turned off. How is that even possible? All in all, if I didn't hear the noise, I would never guess HDD is working...
If you turn your pc off, then the drives have no power. Look for something else that is making that noise. Does you pc case have an led indicator for the hdd activity? most cases and even oem's usually do
Standard desktop drives are only designed to run 8 hours a day, 6 days a week, or 2400 hours a year (100 days). Since most speed sensitive stuff these days is installed on SSD's if possible, having an outright fast mechnical drive is less important. A good option instead of desktop drive therefore is a surveillance drive. They run a bit slower than standard desktop drives at 5900 rpm, but this is the same as the green/eco drives, saving a bit of power. The main benefit though is the usage of the drive, since surveillance drives literally are designed to run 24/7 with constant use over a number of years. Enterprise drives are another option, they are typically 7200 rpm but cost more, but longevity is there! It all depends on your usage patterns. Desktop drives are fine for the light user, for someone that requires an always-on presence or really wants to ensure the safety of their data a surveillance or enterprise drive would be the way to go. It might sound overkill but is data safety something you want to risk? In terms of the drive turning off, again it all depends on the usage pattern. Turning drives on an off all the time is worse than having them running all the time in terms of reliability, the only reason for them spinning down is to save a bit of power. When the drive spins up people want to access the data ASAP. There is a lot of strain spinning the platters from a standstill to 7200 RPM in the few seconds before you can use it. Keeping them running at 7200 rpm is easy as there is little torsional stress, and you are only overcoming friction (which is extremely minimal).
I fixed it! Well, not I, but someone here provided a set of .reg files that disable performance counters and logging of all kind. After I applied those and restarted there was no more noise, at least not like before!
Sounds more like I expect with a very cheapo HDD! Most HDDs I came across easily last longer than 1 year! I know that most WDs can, at least the 7,200 RPM Blues... Possibly even the dreaded 7200.11s lasted longer than that! Even the dreaded Momentus laptop HDDs can last longer than that... Additionally, spinners don't have write limitations like SSDs do! Honestly, I'm far more worried about TLC SSDs!
I bought 2 HDDs 10 years ago, then sold them to a friend, he still uses them. Indeed, I would never ever buy SSD, it does not improve performance, only loading times. I never really get, all this madness about SSDs anyway, I guess marketing does its job.
My browser opens before I even lift the finger, so I am doing just fine on HDD. All the tests SSD vs HDD show, that you gain virtually zero FPS in games. Investing in a better GPU/CPU instead will improve performance much better.
@MrMagic you make my day more happy with this post, I know because I use HDD 3.5 for several years and of course I know about defragmentation et all; now I have one SSD with 240GB only for Windows and now my system load in 3 seconds this is fantastic dude I'm very impressed with it
You show your ignorance posting rubbish like that, "tests show... bla bla bla" What you mean is, "I have never used an SSD, so I am making up crap as I go because I don't know what I am talking about" An SSD does not give more FPS because it is not a CPU or GPU... duh.. lol But actually it can improve gaming performance for certain scenarios such as texture streaming, load times etc PC Performance is more than just in-game FPS buddy, get a clue Before you comment on hardware, make sure you have actually used that piece of hardware first or you just look stupid