HDDs randomly spinning up

[kriegisyourbae]

Hi everybody,

 

HDDs randomly spinning up is probably a topic the more active users have seen before. Unfortuantely, my research didn't help me find a solution.

 

More information:

Spoiler

In my PC I have 2 SSDs and 3 HDDs. Two of the HDDs are entirely empty, one is used only for data such as music, pictures etc. I have set everything up so that there is no (obvious) need for Windows to access either of the HDDs unless I access any of the files. I also configured power management so that HDDs should spin down after a minute.

 

However, although HDDs spin down after some time (that seems to be more than a minute), they do spin up again shortly after or when I put my monitors to sleep by pressing the PC's power button (I configured it that way).

 

I have tried multiple different fixes, including all the suggestions from this video: https://youtu.be/3kcjlGTRaxs

 

Since none of those solved the issue, I used some monitoring software, primarily "resmon". This led me to think "RuntimeBroker.exe" causes the spinups, but disabling notifications for tips etc. has only led to the process not showing up as accessing the HDDs in resmon anymore, but they still spin up.

 

I have checked the event log and seem to have found the cause. Whenever an HDD spins up, there is a new entry in the security protocol, categorized as "Special Logon", "Logon", or "User Account Manangement". However, as I am not familiar with such events, I have no idea how to proceed from hereon and I haven't found anything on the internet regarding this.

 

Does anyone have an idea of why there are these events, how they might correlate to the spin-ups and how I could set stuff up to prevent that from happening?

Edited February 3, 2022 by kriegisyourbae

[suedseefrucht]

27 minutes ago, kriegisyourbae said:

HDDs randomly spinning up

I noticed some HDD activity too, when I was not using it.

I think, the system is checking, if it is still connected or something like that.

 

There is an energy option, where you can turn off a HDD after some time without usage.

[kriegisyourbae]

1 hour ago, suedseefrucht said:

There is an energy option, where you can turn off a HDD after some time without usage.

That is exactly how I have set it up, as stated in the initial post.

[Kilrah]

Do you have monitoring software like HwInfo running? Some will query drive state at regular intervals.

[kriegisyourbae]

6 hours ago, Kilrah said:

Do you have monitoring software like HwInfo running? Some will query drive state at regular intervals.

No, there's no monitoring software running at all. However, tomorrow I will try ending all processes that aren't integral (Afterburner, some audio stuff etc.) and see if that brings any changes. I also tried running Process Monitor today, but I was struggling with the software a bit as I found it difficult to derive which processes are accessing the drives. There was pretty much only Explorer.exe, RuntimeBroker.exe (again) and System.