I keep hearing reading sound from my external hdd

When I check with SystemInformer,there is literally no activity on the drive but I keep hearing the sound it makes when I am reading something from it
It's a 5tb seagate drive
The fragmentation is only 2% and windows says that defragmentation is not needed(the drive have 500gb free space left)

Also for some reason(not always),windows often will not allow me to eject the drive until I restart windows
It's like when I use the option to safely eject the drive,exactly at that time something start using the drive and I cannot eject it

The sound is not like the head is hitting the plates or something else,it literally sounds like the normal reading\writing sound and it happens slowly,not like when you are actually reading or writing

On disk activity in System Informer,svchost.exe and SearchIndexer.exe shows up when I try to eject the drive but windows indexing is disabled on the drive(and everywhere else except the start menu)

Could the drive be in the process indexing itself?

I hear it constantly even when I stop using it for a log time

Time for a new one just to be safe.

OldNavy said:

Time for a new one just to be safe.

Click to expand...

I guess that could be a Win/Win. If it is the drive the problem would be solved and if not, they would have an extra drive.

You may think the drive is idle because no application is running, but Windows may indexing the files or scanning for viruses or downloading updates or whatever else in the background. I would check the drive health first, if it is 100% and the performance hasn't drop considerably, it is probably OK. However, we all need a good excuse for a new and larger drive. I would replace it anyway

Do you have any manufacturer software installed?

I had the same things happen after installing software for a WD drive.

The software was absolutely useless for my needs. Uninstalling it fixed everything.