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On Windows 7.

I have a lot of hard drives which are used for storage.

When launching certain programs (e.g. some games, Photoshop, etc.) the program will automatically try to query/access all of the system's drives for whatever reason (presumably to enumerate them, see how much free space is on them, or access some other property of them).

This means that every time I launch these programs all of my drives have to (slowly!) spin-up even though no files on the drive are actually being used.

This is extremely annoying.

So is there a way I can restrict access to these hard drives, and/or make them invisible to certain programs?

WackGet
  • 797

1 Answers1

2

If you only sometimes use these drives for accessing the contents, go ahead and unmount the volume.

You can use disk management to delete the drive letter for the volume, stopping programs from finding or referencing it. You can mount the drive again later as needed.

This also prevents you from working with those files, or anything else.

Here is a tutorial.

Tutorial

manbearpig
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