How To Stop A Hard Drive From Randomly Spinning Up In Windows 10

Thank you! I've been looking for the cause of this problem for many years, but it seems that most people don't care, especially specialists. Finally, my computer doesn’t spend the night destroying hard drives!
It is unfortunate that this problem has not been solved for more than a decade.

thank you so much, this video tutorial solved the disk randomly spinning! i have 8tb toshiba hdd, that is used as an archive/backup drive. it was annoyingly spinning on random occasions. was driving me mad! still can't believe that the hdd is silent.

hello ! is it possible to stop external hard drive to wake up after i empty Recycle bin with the files of other drive ?

Incredibly helpful, thank you.

Still not working, with my W7 it's perfectly working but on W10 is randomly wakes up.

This did not work for me. Thanks anyways!

Holly F.... non of this helped me... this shit is still spinning, I mean not spinnig cuz I can hear that mechnism is stopping, but the drive still hissing (or something like this), and its a new drive... strange. Only unlpluging it from power cable helps....

nothing works. still cant stop it from spinning. its off for some time and spins up for no reason, it even spins up when i connect usb flash drive to my pc

Doesn't simple "offlining" function in Disk Management options prevent HDDs from producing strange low-frequency noise? I thought offline diactivate a drive compeletly like on hardware level.

This is so strange but offline mode in Windows does not prevent my other drives from some strange annoying noise. One of the drives seem to produce a low periodical (1 sec) noise. That is so much annoying.

Unfortunately this doesn't work for me :(

Thanks. My storage drive was getting increasingly more problems due to constant spinning. I'll need a new one, but for now it increased its lifespan and all the data on it. Thank you so much!

Finally a video about secondary drives in detail. Thank you very much

Nice🎉

if this works youre my hero lol

Did all of that on Windows 11 and it's still spinning all the time and reactivate randomy. It's so annoying because it's 90% of my computer noise coming from the disks.

Thank you!

Nice Video
What helps in Disks you don't need all the time - there is a Programm called RevoSleep which allows you to put Disks to sleep untill you need them again.
Also the Indexing Service, which is not that good when you search a certain file, I disable the Service and use Everything(app) instead.
For searching files (Word, text) that contains a word or sentence the Index can be helpfull.

I have done everything mentioned in this video and other places online yet my drive still spins up and makes a racket when my computer is idle (it doesn't happen when I'm using it). The only thing on it is video files. There's no page file or anything like that on it. I'm on windows 10. It's driving me nuts I cannot find a solution to turn the drive off without just unplugging it. It stops spinning the second I move my mouse.

finally tested it for 2 3 days no spinning after disable the indext thing at the drive and regedit i have alot of hardrives and some times they just start spinning sound out of nowere they not broke but when that happened i sometimes just hit on it to make the sound go away but now they are quiet thnx subbed to your channel.

For me the final culprit was HWiNFO because I had the S.M.A.R.T. polling set to every 30 seconds so I can monitor the temps on my MSI Spatium M480 2TB NVMe SSDs, 7,000 MBps, 700,000 IOPS.

I just plugged it off, lol

Did not work on my rig :/

Thank you! very useful video

NoLowDiskSpaceChecks was the one

thank you very much it worked i swear

This does not work. There are many Windows processes and services that may spin up the hard drive.

Excellent video! Followed the steps a while ago and it worked like a charm, but I had to update windows and it overridden my settings so I came back for a refresher.

PS: Another point to add, if you have a folder from the hard drive you don't want to start in "quick access", then windows will start the hard drive each time you open file explorer, to prevent that, remove any folders from quick access.

I have hp notebook basic laptop and I changed my hard disk WD (inbuild)to Seagate. but facing one problem which is when my laptop is on screen lock or when we not use laptop but laptop is on (screen is off) at that time sound came (like bail) from it and hard disk continues on off, on off. As long as we don't use the laptop, the sound and the hard disk keep turning on and off, this very annoying otherwise hard drive working fine even hard drive health is good. what could be the solution? please help

Nope, did't work to disable this optical drive annoying madness.

I have this problem with spinning up my DVD rom drive when a disc is present. It does this every hour always at about the 26th minute.
Now I disabled Sysmain, hope that this fixes it...
I'm unable to disapble indexing on an optical drive in Windows... or is there a way?

Also, the 'Microsoft Store' running in the background can also needlessly spin-up drives.
Fix: Start > Settings > Privacy > Background apps, Turn off Microsoft Store (plus any other stuff there that you don't want to continually run in the background)

FINALLY FOUND A SOLUTION! If everything in this video also fails to solve the problem for you, try: "RevoSleep" (free). Following every step here (+ a few others found elsewhere), nothing worked, until I found the RevoSleep app (current version as of writing this is v0.4.0).

** Edit for Win10 users: Within RevoSleep, make sure you only check-mark "Sleep" and "Offline", and DON'T CHECK-MARK "Deactivate".
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@GMODISM - Thanks for making this video with such a comprehensive list of actions to potentially solve the problem. You cover many extra steps that aren't mentioned anywhere else, I'm sure you've solved this issue for many. From the comments here, however, it looks like I'm not the only one who still has the issue even after this vid -- if RevoSleep solves it for you too, let me (and the others here) know :)

Cheers!

I just changed the connection cable and and all is back to normal🙃

Don't work still spins up

This seems to have stopped my problem (not allowing files to be indexed). After I made the change, it was still occurring (the starting up of my hard drive), but after I restarted my machine, it hasn't been happening.

What are the ramifications of not allowing files on the drive to have their contents indexed? What does that mean, exactly? And is it all right to simply leave the box unchecked 'forever?' What can I manually do to index the files, or do whatever task this set out to accomplish? Thanks again!

Thanks

Another thing: Keeping shortcuts in the desktop that point to the HDD that you don't want to spin seem to wake it up because of explorer. So create a folder in the desktop and place those shortcuts there.

Sad that no method seems to work for me no matter what, and I'm in an installation with absolutely 0 bloatware. I'll really have to waste half a month of salary buying an nvme drive because I can't stand this vibration and noise anymore.

My HDD keeps being access by Explorer with the operation "QuerryOpen" and IRP_MJ_CLOSE on random pre-selected folders and I really just want to break everything because I can't find the solution anywhere.
Do you know how to stop that?

I been working on computers for years...And this secondary Sata harddrive just kept spinning...It drove
me CRAZY...But after watching your video OMG!!! you help stop this Harddrive spin....I would like to say
THANKS:)..and GMODISM your BADA@@ LOL...YOU HAVE A NEW SUBSCRIBE.....THANKS:)

It would be nice if we could disable sysmain for hard drives only. Thanks for the video.

Thanks for the video. My 2nd HDD showed 100% usage most of time which slowed down Windows. The 2nd HDD is only for data and I have Windows on my SSD. Your paging trick helped me, I don't know how but the Windows selected my 2nd HDD for paging which seems to be the issue for 100% disk usage. Thanks 🙏🙏🙏

Nothing worked

I flipping hate windows I swear. I change settings but it's always changing them back with updates. Or I change a setting in one area but apparently it's not changed unless you change it in some other window, and all kinds of bugs constantly. Such a crap operating system.

also disable windows search i guess

It's not clear to me whether or not doing all these things helped: My external hard drive is certainly continuing to spin at least some. I'm commenting, though, to thank you for such a great, clear help video: I don't believe I've seen any other as good, about anything. Much appreciated. I hope you'll make more.