(solved) Mysterious and frequent activity on secondary disk, event when offline in Disk Management

Question

Update (solved) The sound was coming from my speakers, that's all there is to it. While I go to cringe in a small hole for a few weeks I'd like to thank (and beg forgiveness from) everybody who took time thinking about this. Technically Twisty's comment is the closest to deserving the bounty, but without any actual answers for the question I'm probably not going to award to anyone. Thanks again for the help.

Update 2 I take the disk offline using Disk Management and it still clicks as before. Doers this mean it's solely a hardware issue? If it's offline how could the OS be triggering any access? Some sort of motherboard issue?

Update I'm beginning to think this may have something to do with the 2nd disk's controller. It is quite a cheap drive which I just bought for the space, so perhaps isn't doing things as well as it could. The only driver installed is the default Window one. This poses a few questions:

1. Is there a good reason why a HDD may be 'clicking' when there is no explicit attempt to access them?
2. Is this occasional background work a normal part of operation?
3. Could this possibly be triggered or exacerbated when another disk (the 1st disk) is being explicitly accessed?

Original question

My Window 7 PC has an SSD as the boot disk, containing all program installs and user data, and a secondary HDD which I use to store large files, films and music etc.

When taking literally almost any action on my PC that involves disk access to the 1st disk, the 2nd disk has a burst of activity (it's quite loud so hard to ignore). In particular, loading web pages will cause constant activity until the page is loaded - I've checked with a few different browsers and the results are the same. However, there is no noticeable disk activity when doing nothing (i.e. letting my computer idle), so there is presumably something triggering it.

I've done the usual search for culprits - using Process Monitor, Process Explorer and Resource Monitor and can see no trace of any access to the 2nd drive. I even checked that I wasn't doing anything wrong by creating a few files on the drive - these get picked up by the tools perfectly, but none of the activity heard otherwise is recorded. I tried disabling my anti virus and there is no difference.

Given that I cannot pick up any trace of this activity using the usual tools (I can certainly hear it though!), does anyone have any suggestions as to what might be causing it? Any suggestions as to what I can look for next? Some sort of hardware issue? The disk is brand new.

Any help will be much appreciated :)

System information:

• Windows 7 SP1
• Antivirus: Avast 2014.9.0.2021
• Disk 1: OCZ Vertex
• Disk 2: HGST HTS721010A9

Note I do not believe this is a complete duplicate of this question for the following reasons:

1. Their problem there appears to be one of periodic access, whilst my disk access appears to be triggered by some actions (and will not occur when doing nothing).
2. There is no actual record of the secondary disk access - no spike in resource monitor, no file access in reported in procmon.
3. I have tried shutting down services as suggested by the answer, and no difference was made to the disk access before I couldn't shut down any more.

I have run a trace in DiskMon but am not sure how to reconcile sector numbers with actual access to the 2nd disk. Perhaps someone could give some advice on this? Does DiskMon monitor all physical disks on the system?

Answer 1

[based on my comment:] It's possible the sound isn't actually coming from your hard drive. I've witnessed this same behavior and found the culprit to be nearby speakers, often ones lacking good EMI shielding.

Answer 2

As far as i know it should be one of these or a combination of these:

A- by default windows store cached data in the HDD/SDD, since the system relies in this form of 'speed-time-saving' structure, it will try to cache data in EVERY HDD/SDD connected in your pc, so when you access a lot of webpages the cache on the HDD starts to work to keep the PC running smoothly

B- there's Microsoft's native-propietary HDD defragment routine-system, and it will work at random times (i can confirm it, i have 3 * 1Tb HDD and since i switched to Win 7/8/8.1 the Fragmentation on the HDD never had been a problem, before that i used to run defragmentation soft every 3 months) to keep your HDD at optimum state

C- remember that every HDD is composed of various mobile elements, and when your PC is on, those elements (specially the platters of the HDD) are ALWAYS moving, so from time to time, the system will send a 'request' so the data cache in the HDD still 'always ready' (by keeping the HDD platters spinning at the right speed) and you don't have to wait for the HDD platters to reach the correct RPM to access the data stored (as happens on various HDD's that came with the 'power saving feature' which slows down or stops completely the platters of the HDD)

remember that ALL the SSD/HDD have a 'fixed' optimal lifetime, after that the start to 'decay' due use, in the SSD it's noticeable because the SSD capacity will decline and the read/write speed will decline as well; in the HDD is more easy to notice, the HDD will start to 'sound' like a kettle when boiling water, generating a distinctively noise, the louder the noise, the near to failure of the HDD

Answer 3

As in the edit in the original post, this noise was caused by the speakers I had plugged in.

In case anyone's interested the speakers are an X-Mini Uno portable speaker, plugged in via the USB cable. The noise was presumably due to electrical interference, though I didn't manage to work out exactly what component was causing it.

Solution for the time being: unplug the speakers or turn them down. Long-term solution - buy better speakers not powered by USB.

Thanks again to all who answered/commented.

Answer 4

Windows is living it's own life, so don't bother with this.

If you want to know, which program is accessing disk, you can activate so called Auditing on it.

Here are details: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows7/monitor-attempts-to-access-and-change-settings-on-your-computer

Auditing can flood your logs!