Windows 10: My second hard drive is being constantly accessed and I can't stop it

Immediately after installing Windows 10 on my new build, I noticed my secondary hard drive is being accessed. My primary drive is an SSD so it is silent, but my secondary hard drive is a mechanical Western Digital drive. I can hear it being accessed in a rhythmic manner: every 3 seconds, I heard one second of activity. It isn't a "clicking" noise like a drive about to fail, it's the sound of information being read off the drive or copied to the drive.

Please note that I have not pointed any of the windows folders such as my documents or my pictures to my secondary drive. I don't have a third party virus scanning software installed, and I do not have drive indexing turned on for this secondary drive. There should be no reason for this drive to be accessing every three seconds and it is driving me nuts.

I've checked the drive properties in file explorer and the used/free space isn't changing at all, which tells me that the drive is simply being read from, and not written to.

I've tried using perfmon.exe /res and looking for any process using "D:/" but I see nothing there.

Does anyone have any ideas on how I can get rid of this annoying issue? Thanks in advance.

:)

 

My second hard drive is not being recognized correctly, need help

I am having the same problem with the 2nd drive I installed not being recognized by Windows 10 - it shows up in device
manager and in disk manager - sounds like it might need formatting or? What should I do next?


I have a Dell XPS 8700, this is a new computer installation, but I did upgrade from Windows 8.1 Pro - but I never
used the computer until after I upgraded to W10.

 

My second hard drive is not being recognized correctly, need help

First off thank you and mlg63 for the help, very helpful so far. Question though regarding the "System Reserved". Now that I understand that it is just MB's not GB's which I should have known anyway, I shouldnt have put a letter too it. So now that it
shows up in the "My Computer", I want to get rid of it. If I were to delete volume, would it actually delete the space that Windows reserved, or any info Windows has there?

More or less, I just want to have it now show anymore when I look at My computer.

 

Give the new installation a while to sort out the background tasks and it will probably be silent. Keep task manager up and monitor what processes are running, sorted according to disk activity. I have found it can take a day to settle down and I now routinely leave a new PC installation running over night for the first day and after that it generally settles down. I've never got to the bottom of what actually goes on.

 

Hi, try System Internals Process Monitor (released by MS) - easy to find, free.

Run this long enough to capture possible D: activity.
Stop capture.
Edit, Find D:
and look for references.

If none, suggest you run tests on the disk.

 

That did it thank you!!! It ended up being Corsair Link that was doing it. I have no idea why it was doing it but it was. Corsair Link was the first thing I installed after the Windows installation and I guess I forgot about that. My sanity has been restored, thank you for the help!!!!

 

Well done.. it can be a bit daunting with such a huge log.

 

If it keeps bothering you it should be safe to disable that from starting at boot.