SOLVED One of my HDDs is constantly spinning

[John Kielly]

I have 2 internal drives & one runs its butt of most of the time. Don't know if it's my C or D drive but the C records as being idle, despite being the boot drive, while the d drive is listed as active - maybe at the time I wake up the desktop. It slows down booting apps & is atrocious if I select a file to open using explorer. Reindexing seems to help a bit, sometimes, as long as the box doesn't go to sleep.

Any Ideas?

 

[Digerati]

Don't know if it's my C or D drive but the C records as being idle, despite being the boot drive, while the d drive is listed as active

What is telling you that?

Note that hard drives spin - that is how they work. If they have power to them, by default they always spin while the computer is awake. This is why they are often called "spinners", to differentiate them from SSDs which don't have any moving parts. If they were not constantly spinning, the performance of your system would greatly suffer as it would constantly be in wait states waiting for the drive platters to spin up to speed before any data could be read from or written to the drives.

If you mean the drive activity light on your computer case is constantly showing activity, that may or may not indicate an issue. A lot of stuff (OS "house-keeping", indexing, security scans, defragging, etc.) happen when you, the user, go idle. If you don't spend a lot of time on your system and you turn off when not in use, then it has more to do when you do power it on.

 

[ndashutosh parekh]

Hello all,
I am new to this forum but having this same old problem of spinning drive. My machine is pretty bad. The drive is pegged at 100% and system response to slow to none, even a mouse movement is delayed.
I managed to get to windows update page and it has downloaded some update and installation is stalled. The %complete on the installation is not progressing. I suspect this is causing the drive to constantly spin trying to install.
I believe the update downloaded maybe related to windows defender.
I wanted to mention this here as another avenue to explore instead of drivers, power management etc

Any help on how to resolve this will be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance.