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Hey gang,

Wondering if there is a solution to my "issue." So I have a SSD and a HDD in my system. Windows and most routine apps are on my SSD. I run win 7 and notice that periodically my HDD spins up and is accompanied by mild vibration and acoustics (typical of mechanical HDDs). My HDD does not support AAM to lower noise levels via software and I'm perplexed as to why windows spins up the idle drive even though I do not routinely access the HDD. Is there a way to configure windows to leave the HDD in an idle low-noise state all the time (unless, of course, I'm actually accessing the HDD).

Thanks in advance!

Hi there,
Try checking your recycle bin and system restore settings to see if they use the secondry drive. I know by default in WinXP it uses every drive unless you tell it not to.I don't know if that'll sort your problem but it certainly helped on mine with 10 hard drives showing in explorer. You could also try running Process Explorer from the Sysinternals Suite. Make sure you go into View, select columns and on the process performance tab check the I/O Delta Reads, Writes and Other boxes. This shows which process' are writing to hard drive and how much. Hope this helps.

Sounds lie something is using it. If you are not, it could be something like a page file. I'd use the system monitor to watch what is using the disk. It sounds like you have the power settings correct.

EDIT: Is your SSD 100% partitioned? I ask because if it is, and rather full, Windows will, I think, use other storage to act as a swap if your memory gets full.