I'm using an SSD for my primary HD, so waiting on an external HD to spin up makes me have to wait 4-5 seconds for something to load when it's on my external -- I'm not used to waiting. Update Disk Driver. A hard drive, be it internal or external, may fail to spin up due to several reasons, generally a mechanical or electrical failure. ... HDD keeps spinning down in Windows 8.1 - hdparm and power options already set. Click "Device Manager" then expand "Disk drives". 10 New 13 Sep 2018 #1. One for Windows 8, one for Windows 7 and one for data. Unplug the AC adapter from the computer. I also tried to disable the controller for the HDD in the Device Manager, but this just made my drive remain spinning constantly. If this external hard drive keeps disconnecting issue still appears after you connect the external hard drive to your computer via USB 2.0, you can try solution 2. 4.) It is said that this external hard drive keeps disconnecting issue can be caused by the power feature. I could not locate which software actually keeps … Setting the Windows power settings to turn off my HDD after 1 min of inactivity makes the drive spin down, but then wake up after around 20 s. When I set it to turn off after 2 min of inactivity it spins down very rarely, suggesting that there is something that is accessing the HDD at irregular intervals between 1:20 ~ 2:00 min. For a hard drive not spinning, getting the data off of it is impossible. People have been noticing that their external hard drives continue to spin even when they have stopped using the drive. Now turn off the PC for at least 1 minute. Discussion threads can be closed at any time at our discretion. The external hard drive becomes unreadable and corrupted due to carelessly disconnecting or powering down the industry without following the eject drive protocol. Posted by 4 years ago. Hi guys! People have been noticing that their external hard drives continue to spin even when they have stopped using the drive. Why is Windows constantly spinning up my secondary HDD? Just to add to the solution pool, I had an external hard drive that just yesterday wouldn't mount, and like in the original poster's situation the drive seemed fine, no weird noises, spun up as usual. I appreciate the replies. I have a 500GB WD external hard drive with USB connectivity. The hard drive in this iMac G5 keeps on spinning indefinitely with a winding noise. How is a vacant House seat filled in Louisiana? I use WD Elements 2TB external USB HDD in USB 3.0 port for maximum optimization but the problem is that even after I safely remove from my file manager or Unity Dash it keeps rotating which I can feel very clearly. My hard drive spin and then stop. Thanks everyone! Just would not mount. Plugging a hard drive with a burned PCB into a power supply unit can cause the unit to fail as well. 3. In this case study, our client had a dying hard drive filled with their important Quicken documents. By watching the timer on DiskMon, I am collecting all the activity from the process "system" at the same time stamp via Process Monitor (advanced output and profiling events enabled). For solid state drives (SSD) this has no affect, but for traditional mechanical hard drives, when this happens the hard drive will ‘spin down’ – reducing its power usage and giving the drive an opportunity to cool down. The only files that are being written at the corresponding timestamps from DiskMon are C:\pagefile.sys and C:\$LogFile. Podcast Episode 299: It’s hard to get hacked worse than this, (solved) Mysterious and frequent activity on secondary disk, event when offline in Disk Management. Thanks for the update. MDIS is an easy to use program that allows you to select a hard drive and keep it spinning. Keep Data Safe in Case of Hard Drive Beeping/Clicking due to Disk Failure. I have a 2TB Seagate external hard drive connected via USB to my Late-2013 iMac. A drive that is not spinning is safer than one that is spinning when the drive gets jarred. This peak is high if the HDD did have time to spin down and then was woken up by the process causing the peak. I will try taking the casing off when I get a chance. Maybe this could be it 1. So you can use DIY software before your hard drive becomes dead due to physical damage. If your hard drive’s PCB becomes so severely shorted that it starts to burn when you plug it in, it has definitely failed. It was coming form the area of the hard drive. They are designed to spin-down when idle. Maybe this could be it 1. Why does wprintf transliterate Russian text in Unicode into Latin on Linux? So, I listened with a stethoscope on the back panel to identify the exact location of the noise. The read/write heads have crashed into the platters and are now preventing the hard drive from spinning-up. However, this process did not correspond perfectly to my HDD wakes and disabling it did not help. The peak is tiny (but still there) if the HDD never had time to go to idle. To do this, disconnect your external hard drive from the computer. 3. If I leave my Xbox on instant-on mode, during the night, I can hear it spinning up the hard drive for a few seconds, before turning it off again, then literally 5 minutes later it will do the same thing. By default Windows 10 will power down hard drives after 20 minutes of inactivity (or if the computer is a laptop, 10 minutes when on battery). © 2020 CNET, A RED VENTURES COMPANY. Adidas year-end sale: Get 50% off Ultraboost 20 running shoes and more, Watch Wonder Woman 1984 today with HBO Max -- and don't skip the end credits, How to watch Pixar's Soul with Disney Plus today, Discuss: Issue: Continuous external hard drive spinning, http://www.bivalve.net/reference/OS-X/background-processes.html. When you search external hard drive keeps disconnecting issue on the internet, you can find some users say that this problem is solved by changing the USB 3.0 port to USB 2.0 port. Active 7 years, 7 months ago. Type defragment on the Windows search bar and select Defragment and Optimize Drives. My iMac is set not to go to sleep but will go into a standby state (monitor off) when idle. You can easily put an end to the beeping noises produced by your external hard drive. Hard Drive Not Spinning, First Remarks Try Fixing it Yourself if Data Not Too Important. I can hear a drive spinning up to full speed every few minutes. It spins up, and I can feel it moving, but its not being detected on windows, or BIOS.. Ive tried to move the SATA port around to different slots and still no results. Open Disk Defragmenter by clicking the Start button . The reason being, there are equal chances of USB Port damage. My previous computer had Windows 7, and on that OS, the same external hard drive would happily stay spinning 24/7, always. Sept. 2, 2009 3:15 a.m. PT People have been noticing that their external hard drives continue to spin even when they have stopped using the drive. Try fixing noises from an external hard drive by plugging the power adapter directly into the wall instead of a power strip, using a shorter USB cable, using USB 2.0+ ports, or connecting the hard drive to a USB port on the back of the computer instead of the front. If you are certain that your external hard drive is causing the strange noises, it's time for you to protect the data security now. 1. The next step is to put the drive into a working computer. I just put a new 4TB HDD in my computer and I couldn't figure out why the head was parking and unparking frequently. How can I read local files from blind XSS? My chainstays have been eaten by rust, can something be done? Seagate External Hard Drive CONSTANTLY spinning up and down while iMac is in Standby. My HDD lamp keeps blinking. Click on the drive icon to highlight the drive and the window will display the information about the current drive and the file system. If you know that it is the System process that writes something to the external hard drive, you could trace what the process is doing in the Process Monitor: Start/stop the capture with Ctrl+E. My solution to this problem: Windows 8.1 automatically created a page file on my HDD instead of placing one on the SSD. 4. How can I spin up a drive with batch script? The player seems to be working fine with my hard drive, but it never stops spinning even once I eject it or shut the WD Live player off, or both. Any ideas of what this is or thoughts on what to do? Sure enough, the external hard drive no longer powers on by itself. hard drive keeps spinning up during idle, even in safe mode New laptop, windows 10 home. My main OS is on the C: partition of my SSD and on my HDD I have a D: partition for storage and an E: partition for recovery. Spin down secondary HDD on Windows 7 HP Notebook. On this page, we'll show you why is hard drive clicking, how to repair hard drive/external hard drive clicking sound without losing any data. Let’s take into consideration one by one.Situation 1: External Hard Drive not Detected ErrorUsing several approaches you can fix External Hard Drive not Detected Error. The hard drive is suffering from damaged read/write heads. In the search box, type Disk Defragmenter, and then, in the list of results, click Disk Defragmenter.‌ If … The hard drive would spin up, like any healthy hard drive would. 2. The external HDD (Seagate STDT3000300 BACKUP PLUS Desktop 3TB, USB3.0, 3.5 inch external drive, powered by external power) of my Xbox One keeps spinning up for a few seconds then spinning down again a few seconds later and this cycle repeats every 60 seconds exactly. Jump to page: airtas. The platter motor which should spin the platters inside the hard drive chassis has become seized. Rotational hard drives usually remain spinning, because it takes quite a long time for them to get up to speed. Mac. Using a WinHEx I was now able to determine that the sector that is written is part of what WinHEx labes as "unpartionable space" (yes, not unpartioned) on my secondary HDD. It then stops spinning and is unrecognized by the computer. Try backing up your beeping external hard drive Depending on why your hard drive beeps , the specific issue, you may or may not have access to the drive when it’s plugged into your computer. Why don't all dividend-yielding companies offer dividend reinvestment plans (DRIPs)? Step 4. When you want to open an external hard drive, Windows prompts you to format the disk before you can use it, or access is denied. In contrast, hard drive clicking and not detected turns into the most common symptom when it is the external hard drive that has been damaged somehow. To rule out background processes, I boot into plain safe mode, no networking. Drive fixer How to troubleshoot and fix external drive not detected issues on Windows 10 If your PC isn't detecting an external hard drive, use this guide to resolve the issue. I wonder, why Process Explorer showed the read/write disk bytes change under the 'System' process, instead of under one of the svchost.exe processes. I have an external USB hard drive plugged in, and after a few minutes, when there's been no activity against it, it automatically spins down, stops, and is unmounted. Despite having 8 GB of RAM, whenever I would restore a program from being minimized, it would freeze the PC until that drive spun up. Whenever they connect an external hard drive to a USB 3.0 port, the computer fails to read it. You may have a bunch of these working together to drive your drive "nuts". Way 1: Back up External Hard Drive How to prevent a secondary HDD from spinning down? I hadn’t experienced anything like this since I setup the system over one year ago. The greens won’t use a lot of power, and all WD internal drives are designed to run around the clock. Hard drive spins up randomly without any activity in Resource Monitor. Your hard drive doesn’t spin up and you see/smell smoke. Even if your external hard drive makes beeping noises, if it is still accessible and recognizable, do back up your data as soon as possible. Then right-click on the unallocated space on your external hard drive and create a new volume on it. Xbox spinning up hard drive every 5 minutes for a few seconds whilst in sleep mode So I'm not sure if this is a bug, but I have never noticed this until recent. XBOX One external hard drive keeps spinning up and down every minute. site design / logo © 2020 Stack Exchange Inc; user contributions licensed under cc by-sa. I have identified a peak in the resource manager that corresponds to the HDD activity. After reading another thread, I also tried disabling my page file (even though it's located on C:), just to see if this would make any difference, but it did not. I got it working once in March, and I downloaded all my old backup files and such to my new computer. Thanks for contributing an answer to Super User! The process that runs system, Hehe, I'm a little reluctant to install it again since it is all working fine now. hard drive keeps spinning, 24/7, even when I push the "off" button ‎12-21-2017 04:50 PM. Every ten seconds. My PSU was supplying inconsistent voltage. A fragmented hard drive generates additional drive activity. But before you proceed to fixing, do try backing up the external hard disk drive if the drive allows, of course. I had this exact problem and what fixed it was to switch the power source to the hard drive. Recently picked up a Seagate 3TB External Hard Drive to add to my XBox One. 1. Once Disk Utility is launched a drive list will be displayed in the left hand column. rev 2020.12.18.38240, The best answers are voted up and rise to the top, Super User works best with JavaScript enabled, Start here for a quick overview of the site, Detailed answers to any questions you might have, Discuss the workings and policies of this site, Learn more about Stack Overflow the company, Learn more about hiring developers or posting ads with us. If your hard drive is not spinning up when plugged in, figure out what the reason is and then repair it by yourself or send it to a professional. Nothing happens and no new drive is displayed in the File Explorer window. Under status, select the disk you want to defragment. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Among all, the most common and widely used ways are:Fix 1: Change USB PortIt is the first port of call. Hi, thanks for having this forum. I know that the external hard drive does not show up on the file manager. Thanks for all the help! I can't tell which one is spinning up. I checked the time machine settings and time machine is actually off. With the exception of the system drive, all other drives connected to the system were USB-connected external hard drives. The Sentinel Service did not uninstall with Lightworks, but somehow my HDD stays idle now that Lightworks is gone. If you find a hard drive not spinning, then try to recover the drive yourself. Let us know! There are process profiling event, IRP MJ WRITE, a page file on C (even though i turned that off) and FASTIO_RELASE_FOR_CC_FLUSH and several more FASTIO events. So I have a maxtor 500gb hard drive, and it has had yet to fail me until now. Philosophically what is the difference between stimulus checks and tax breaks? I have a new MacBook Pro and I'm having this issue when I connect an external hard drive through the USB port. Stack Exchange network consists of 176 Q&A communities including Stack Overflow, the largest, most trusted online community for developers to learn, share their knowledge, and build their careers. Some Time Machine users are concerned that the drive was being accessed by another, unauthorized application or because of a bug. Anybody can fix it? Allow bash script to be run as root, but not sudo. Indexing is disabled for E: and D: and currently paused for all locations. Some Time Machine users are concerned that the drive was being accessed by another, unauthorized application or because of a bug. As of now I'm pretty lost and searching the web isn't helping me. Steps to uninstall and reconnect external hard drive. The hard drive keeps continuously running and running. Ran the Yosemite Beta and GM and never had this issue. Thanks for the tip! Posts : 6. I have it set not to go to sleep because I use Parallels Access sometimes (though that barely works because more than half the time, my iMac shows up as Offline and Parallels customer service is useless). Therefore, I would assume that the external hard drive adapter is faulty. One of the simplest troubleshooting steps in external hard drive cases keeps disconnecting the issue of changing the USB port on your system. The external Seagate drive should appear in this list as a selectable drive. At first I thought that it was the fan. I solved it on a different route (see below), but I learnt a lot from your tips! Did your drive come with any configuration software which might have options for performance or energy saving to which you might be able to configure it through the OEM external drive … Does a mechanical hard drive (not SSD) spin constantly while the machine is on? That being said, if you wanted a drive that “spun-down” you might consider a WD external such as a My Book Essential. It was set to never, but using a special Seagate tool I changed it to 1 hour to see if that would make a difference. I couldn’t connect to the drives, and the lights on the drive casing indicated that they were in sleep mode. It's been an hour now. Viewed 5k times 6. How can I locate and repair a leak on a flat roof? Windows 10 Constant Hard Drive Activity Upgraded from Windows 8 to 10 and my hard drive is constantly running and the background processes under Task Manager are very active. The new one was cycling at least every 20 seconds. How critical is it to declare the manufacturer part number for a component within the BOM? Why deleting a file in windows re-spin / wake up / power up all the hard drives? Every time I close the lid on my macbook air, my external hard drive seems to spin up for about 5 seconds every 30 seconds, and this will go on continuously, even for several hours. I guess I'm gonna have to learn to live with that. Normally this can be controlled using the Energy Saver preference pane in System Preferences, and that should be your first resort in dealing with the problem, rather than this or any other third party software. Be respectful, keep it civil and stay on topic. By that I mean, it will go to sleep, or "spin down," and then a few minutes later, for some reason it will wake back up again. What an external hard drive beeping noise might mean Different external hard drives indicate different kinds of problems by emitting an audible beep. Process Explorer has a special column that tracks the change of the number of bytes read or written by a process: You might be able to capture the name of the process that is reading or writing data to your secondary HDD this way. To subscribe to this RSS feed, copy and paste this URL into your RSS reader. What I think happens is that if you have the auto update option turned on, some game updates are not installed until you start the game and it stays in some sort of suspend mode and this is what keeps the hard drive powering back on. It only takes a minute to sign up. At night, it's 12:25am here. Open Disk Defragmenter by clicking the Start button . Experiencing problems? What is the reason for failing to solve the following equation? @ChrisJD Great! With your tip I monitored the Delta Write Column in Process Explorer at the same time as the Resource Monitor and DiskMon. I reported this problem in the Lightworks forum. Click the Start button on the desktop Method 1: Try A Different USB Port. Finally, if your drive is online and formatted, but doesn't show a drive letter next to its name, right-click the volume and choose Change Drive Letter and Paths to add a drive letter. If you know that it is the System process that writes something to the external hard drive, you could trace what the process is doing in the Process Monitor: Maybe you could track the thread ID associated with a certain IRP event and then track the thread that caused that IRP event: I stopped being fancy and decided to go in and disable all running services one by one until the computer crashed or my disk stayed idle. By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service, privacy policy and cookie policy. Apple Support Discussions user "Pondini" suggests: "Window Server is responsible for managing the display and mediating between the various applications and other processes that want to display information on it. It kind of defeats the purpose if I have to keep unplugging and replugging it in every time I want to use it. I'm afraid of unplugging it while spinning and I don't want to take chance. Lost backup data from an external drive; Corrupted data; Virus-infected data; Note: Data recovery software only works on working hard drive. Take it easy, we will show you two useful methods below. I'm having a problem with windows constantly spinning up my secondary HDD. Close. Applies to: Force not responding external hard drive to show up and work by updating disk drivers. Great... Do you have any idea where to go from here? Step 2. Remove the battery from the battery compartment. Quite often, issues such as a Seagate external hard disk light blinking but not being detected can be fixed by simply rebooting the computer. I have 3 hard drives. Using DiskMon I saw that the length of the writes are 2 and the sector is 1465147856. Backblaze, an unlimited online backup company that keeps 25,000 hard drives spinning at all time, has published its results on hard drive lifespan — and … Step 1: Launch MiniTool Power Data Recovery Trial Edition to its main interface, then choose a proper recovery module to continue. This is true, whether it be PATA, SATA, SCSI, IDE, USB, internal, or external hard disk drive (HDD). Windows 10 keeps External Hard Drive running during shut down I switched over to Windows 10 and noticed my external hard drive stays on after shut down. Below is the solution for external hard drive not recognized by Windows 10. I'm confused that the situation seems to come and go so suddenly, without any reason I can figure out. External hard drive spinning up during sleep. We delete comments that violate our policy, which we encourage you to read. I googled it and it seems to be related to Lightworks which I then uninstalled. Is there any way I can find out exactly what the system process is doing? When Time machine is backing up to it, it is understandable, but it "churns" even when Time machine is not using it, for example, when I simply save a file to my documents folder (I never save anything directly to my Time Machine drive) or sometimes for no reason at all.". 2.) From the moment I log into Windows 10, my hard drive is cranking away at 100%. Super User is a question and answer site for computer enthusiasts and power users. Right-click "This PC" and choose "Manage". Keep your external hard drives spinning. But there are a few old backups I’d like to get hold of again. Solution 1: Use a Different USB Port . 1. However, the same behavior is present when starting Windows with all non-Microsoft services disabled, suggesting that third party software probably isn't the culprit. I have identified the process as "System". External hard drive cases generally shut the drive down when it detects that it is not plugged into a computer. When I installed Win 7 a few months ago, my drive stayed quiet until I clicked it in Explorer, so I there is something that has changed within the last few months either with Windows or with some third party software. Your problem description is exactly the problem I was having. How can I disable auto-reading on DVD-ROM? Drive access with nothing but the System process accessing the drive. Just as in cases where the disks are not spinning at all, one possibility is that the printed control board is failing and cannot send enough power to the spindle motor, which spins the drive’s hard disk platters. It happens about every 3 minutes or so, all day and night. By using our site, you acknowledge that you have read and understand our Cookie Policy, Privacy Policy, and our Terms of Service. Removed Lightworks and the mysterious drive access is gone. Good job. Is there a way to stop the hard drive off and keep it attached? But I might do it tonight since you were so helpful earlier =), @trismarck: Since it is a software enforcing licensing it is probable that it uses some. Every time I need to do something on my external hard drive, it has to spin up. the dvd drive accepts discs (both dvds and cds) it spins up like its gonna read the disc, then stops spinning then spins back up, it does this a couple times then it ejects the disc on its own. Using Sysinternals Process Monitor, I filter for any process that includes "D:" or "E:" in its path, and this made me able to identify and disable the QueryFullSizeInformationVolume via the registry key NoLowDiskSpaceChecks. External hard drives make noises, too. If the hard drive is cliking and making noise in your computer, be careful. That started in the last two weeks. Can I prevent a secondary HDD from spinning up when waking my computer? So, I guess the problem was somewhere there... Lightworks and the sentinel service did not get along and this caused my secondary HDD to wake up through writes in parts of it's "unpartionable" space... yeah that doesn't make much sense to me, but if someone googles this, you know what to do. Can anyone identify this biplane from a TV show? I want recovery my data.twitter : @nataporn29 I might try to boot another OS from a USB, but If anyone has any advice that can point me to a solution of my problem I would be very grateful. To determine if the disk needs to be defragmented or not, click on optimize button. Whil. I have let it run for several hours with no activity on my part and along with the hard drive running my cooling fan is never turning off or slowing down. Luckily, I have not lost too many files or anything. 4. Step 1. Have feedback? hitachi hard drive inside keeps spinning up and down every minute or two while idle. Do enemies know that a character is using the Sentinel feat? Asking for help, clarification, or responding to other answers. Can one reuse positive referee reports if paper ends up being rejected? It could be a sign of a failing hard drive. Thanks for A2A, and thanks for providing the correct details of your drive—it makes it easier for people to give intelligent answers instead of guessing. However, I can't identify anything that is unique to the time stamps when there is activity on my 2ns HDD. However, using WinHex, nfi and Disk Explorer, I was unable to find which file was located at this sector (they couldn't findd it or it was located outside. Ask Question Asked 7 years, 7 months ago. This issue can be caused due to an issue in the physical port or due to corrupt drivers. Mounting HDD starts to constantly spinning, hdd won't spin down even with sata port disabled. 3.) Making statements based on opinion; back them up with references or personal experience. If you're prompted for an administrator password or confirmation, type the password or provide confirmation. I am laying in bed wanting to kill, simply because my XBox One is constantly powering up my external hard drive for 4-6 seconds, halting before repeating the cycle. If your external hard drive starts making a beeping noise, here’s what you need to know. SF short story about body-hopping alien hunted by cop, Paint texture getting rough at second coat. I hate to think how many load/unload cycles that has put on my other WD Green drives over the last year. The hard drive is still making noise as though it is constantly spinning. As of now, Process Monitor reports that zero processes are accessing my HDD. To learn more, see our tips on writing great answers. Windows 10 Constant Hard Drive activity I just bought a brand new HP laptop with an i5 processor, 8 gigs of RAM, and a 1TB hybrid drive. Thus, plug in your hard drive into another Port to identify the exact cause and confirm whether a problem e… In a 2005 article, he wrote that "Most of the normal wear is on the drive bearings: They’re always in use whenever the motor’s spinning, even if the rest of the drive is idle.