Why my internal HDD-s keep spinning up?

hdmi · Sep 9, 2023

mBrane said:
OP, this thread has definitely been giving you the run-around! I have a nice zippy new ASUS laptop with dual NVMe SSDs and a couple of mechanical HDs attached via Thunderbolt and USB4 for backups and larger things. I see the same thing and it's a BS Windows OS thing. For example, copying a file from one SSD to another invariably pauses, to allow the (completely-uninvolved) HDs to spin up. It's a thorough - but brute force - way to do things, from the developers'/OS's perspective. Explorer (and likely the underlying disk subsystem) needs to get smarter / more-elegant.

Personally, I'm going to (ham-fistedly and energy-inefficiently) set the HD sleep timer to 15 mins (when laptop is plugged in). Will post back results (if I remember!):
View attachment 70288

P.S. There are some additional tools listed at the bottom of this article. Good luck!

Laptop secondary HDD sleep

Hi, my laptop has a primary system SSD and a secondary data HDD. If I try to let the HDD go to sleep it will always be woken up from time to time. Indexing is disabled, system protection is disabled for that drive, it is set as an excluded folder in Windows Defender (scheduled scans are disabled...

www.elevenforum.com

Cold_Miserable · Sep 21, 2023

Its because windows 11 is insufferable trash. Dismounting drives does nothing.
Windows Update and Defender spin up all drives randomly on their own at any time for no reason. You must remove all of these by deleting their .dll files to stop this malicious behaviour.
Storport must also be disabled:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\StorPort]
"TelemetryPerformanceEnabled"=dword:00000000
"TelemetryErrorDataEnabled"=dword:00000000
"TelemetryDeviceHealthEnabled"=dword:00000000
"LogControlEnable"=hex(b):00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00

Drives still spin up to due to the system process itself. The only option is to unplug.

hdmi · Sep 21, 2023

Cold_Miserable said:
Its because windows 11 is insufferable trash. Dismounting drives does nothing.
Windows Update and Defender spin up all drives randomly on their own at any time for no reason. You must remove all of these by deleting their .dll files to stop this malicious behaviour.
Storport must also be disabled:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\StorPort]
"TelemetryPerformanceEnabled"=dword:00000000
"TelemetryErrorDataEnabled"=dword:00000000
"TelemetryDeviceHealthEnabled"=dword:00000000
"LogControlEnable"=hex(b):00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00

Drives still spin up to due to the system process itself. The only option is to unplug.

The solution I posted above works for me on both Windows 10 and 11 across multiple different hardware combinations, also including external USB 3.0 HDDs that use a USB-to-SATA3 adapter with UASP (e.g. ASMT 2105 or similar).

Cold_Miserable · Sep 22, 2023

Never mind. Its solved.
Remove: Storport, Defender, Windows Update and all the usual bloat&crap. Windows 11 will not spin up drives, on its own, anymore.
Indexing / superfetch "sysmain" / windows search are fine to keep.

The bads news is you'll have no tamper protection and Windows still spins up drives if you install/uninstall programs, right click taskbar sometimes, delete files on the SSD or use task manager.