Windows 10: hard drive keeps spinning up during idle, even in safe mode

New laptop, windows 10 home.
hitachi hard drive inside keeps spinning up and down every minute or two while idle.

To rule out background processes, I boot into plain safe mode, no networking.

Same thing. hdd spins up randomly when no one is touching the computer.

What's triggering the spin ups?

:)

 

Windows 10 100% Disk Problem on Task Manager

That shouldn't slow you down to let it turn off the hard disk after it's idle. That basically lets the hard drive stop spinning after it goes unused for a while (for example you're typing in Word, which is loaded into RAM, and so the drive itself isn't
needing to read/write anything at the moment). But in this example, if the drive had turned off and you hit the Save icon, the drive would have to spin back up to 7200 RPM speed before it could write the file, so you might see your computer "hang" while the
drive gets up to speed and then saves your file.

It doesn't take THAT much power to keep a drive spinning once it's already at speed (like coasting down the highway but with no air resistance), so typically you'd only really care to let it idle down when the computer was on battery power.

 

beeping when screen turns off in balanced/power saver plans

I have Lenovo ideapad300 15ibr laptop with Windows 10 64 bit.

When on battery in balanced and power saver plans after the screen turns itself off after set time idle there is a beep like when the computer turns on and a sound like a drive spinning up. It then goes quiet and every 20 seconds or so another beep and the
drive/fan spins up and then goes quiet again.

Strangely this does not happen in High Performance power plan even if all advanced settings are set to the same as either balanced or power saver. It also does not happen when power cord is plugged in.

It does not happen in safe mode and so I tried disabling the Intel HD driver which gives the same look as in safe mode but in normal windows the problem remains.

All drivers appear up to date.

Is this a feature of windows 10 that it tries to shut down the hard drive when the screen is off and spin up when needed and it just so happens that this makes my laptop beep.

I can work around this by creating my own power plan based on the high performance plan or by setting balanced and power saver plans to go straight to sleep rather than staying on with screen off.

I am wondering whether this is a windows issue with a solution or a sign of a hardware problem that could get worse over time e.g hard drive failure

Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks

 

Hello link626 Welcome to the Ten Forums!

Often something will be writing to the drive that will be running unnoticed in the background. One way to force the drive to sleep a bit when not being active would be going into the Start>Settings>System>Power & Sleep to make a few adjustments maybe even create a new custom plan. When the Power & Sleep screen appears you then go to the Additional power settings option at the bottom to open up the next screen where you can simply click on the Change plan settings for the Balanced plan the laptop came with which then moves onto the next screen or simply change from Balanced to Power saver.

On the third screen under any plan you will see the Change advanced power settings option which brings up a totally new screen full of items where you will find the Hard Disk settings are the second item in plain view for raising or lowering the minutes of inactivity before the drive goes to sleep as well as the "never" option for high performance desktop application mostly.





For creating a totally new plan where you can tweak things at your own pace leaving the other existing plans untouched you will want to review the guide for Creating your own power plan

 

This should tell you what's accessing your drive
Activity Indicator download | SourceForge.net

 

That's a good one! Don't be surprised however if it turns out your av software is the most often seen item in the activity logs!

That's typical of what you will be seeing when watching each active process with the time stamp option checked off. You will note the only things running are the Team Viewer program for viewing that remotely on a second pc and the av software. Presently that is booted into the latest Insider Preview build not having anything else running where there is some small activity being logged.