Windows 10: Secondary (data) HDD frequent unnecessary activity

Hello everyone, I have a laptop with a primary SSD and a secondary HDD. On the HDD there are only programs and personal files, the paging file is enabled only on the primary drive. Despite being a Dell device, I am on AHCI since I've switched from RAID in the BIOS while trying to get the behaviour I want from my machine. Though it's not the only issue I've got, right now I have been keeping an eye on my HDD activity since I'd really like to have it spin down rather than keeping it spinning all the time: the problem is that if it spins down, after a while it will spin up again to do something, even without me doing anything related to that drive. At first, Through Resource Monitor I was able to see that Defender was scanning each program on the HDD at regular intervals, so I excluded the D: folder in Defender settings (just to see) and that activity now seems gone. Still, the disk is accessed from time to time by the System process doing something in the D: folder, D:\Programs, even a font folder contained in the Solidworks stuff; often some NTFS activity (file master table, volume register, etc) shows up and I'd assume it's just registering the HDD events, though many times it's there all alone doing something and I can't really tell. I have also given Sysinternals Process Monitor a try and by filtering the results I have found the activity on D: (the HDD) to be mainly as shown in the attachment; nothing labelled as System. I can provide a more extensive list of what's going on if necessary, anyway I'd be happy to find a way to stop windows from doing stuff in the background on the non-system drive without asking. I have also tried looking for scheduled tasks with no luck. I haven't tried disabling indexing yet, though it is activated only for a few folders on the HDD, while most of the time the accessed paths are not selected for indexing. This is my first post on TenForums, it has helped me a lot of times and I hope this can help other people too in some way Thanks in advance to anyone that will help me. (Windows 10 20H2 19042.928)

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100% Usage on Secondary HDD

I'm sure that isn't a problem with my HDD. I've just bought this brand new WD 4TB HDD. And on the top of this inquiry, I mentioned that something wired is that the 100% usage jumps between HDDs. It's disk E,F,G this time and it would be disk C,D or H,L next
time after I restart.(I have 3 Secondary Hdds).

The 100% occurs only when some applications are making use of the disk, such as file copying.

 

Help choosing a secondary HDD

I have a Samsung SSD 850 Pro 256GB SATA (love this thing) as a boot drive and a 1TB Toshiba HDD for storage and every thing else. I need a bigger secondary HDD. Is there an advantage to a hybrid drive like the Seagate FireCuda as a secondary drive? Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance.

 

D:\... is unavailable (My Secondary HDD for Data)

Hello everyone,

I have a SSD (C drive for programs) and an HDD (D drive for documents). My HDD is circa 5 years old and until yesterday it ran without problems. It didn't even become noticeable slower for me.

Now I get the following error trying to access it:




Opening Disk Management shows the drive as uninitialized and trying to initialze it fails:




I haven't done any Windows Beta updates, just the forced updates were installed, which is out of my reach
My specs are as followed:




Can you guys help me out and give me some advise what I can try?
Thank you in advance!