I've installed an SSD and HDD in the optical drive slot on my notebook. I'm using windows 8.1 x64, running from my SSD which is my primary drive.
My problem is taht HDD spins up/down constantly, in the past 8 hours the number of spinups reachead 400.
I've changed "Turn off hard disk after" feature to "Never" in Advanced Power Options, but no luck, nothing changed.
Could this be a hardware oriented problem, or can I configure the energy management features for this?
I had the same problem.
Using a Process Hacker/Explorer (whichever you prefer) and windows resource monitor
Search for the drive letter (e.g. e:\) of your HDD in Process Explorer/Hacker, this will show you the processes that are using it. Some such as the journal are innocent and keep handles open even though they aren't using the disk. In the lower pane (sort by handle type and look for files), when it is showing handles, you will see the drive access happen periodically in the offending process, it will be highlighted green and red as it opens and closes the file.
Resource monitor (Accessories|System) will show you disk activity that you can filter by executable and sort by path.
I found it to be dell datasafe.
Once you have found the culprit you can stop it running at startup using autoruns (sysinternals)
