Windows 10: Why does my external hard drive spin up randomly and how to stop it?

I have an external Seagate HDD connected to my Windows 11 laptop. The HDD spins up when it is in use and is set up to spin down after 5 minutes of inactivity. Even when I am not using the machine, it still randomly spins up, and the LED indicates usage for about 1 second. This happens every couple of minutes. There is no software on that drive and no components of the OS, so I see no reason for it to spin up. I have used Process Monitor to see what is causing it, but it just says that Powershell is accessing it. By the way, I want to fix this because I want to minimize wear and because it's lo

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external hard drive spins up randomly. How to find trigger?

i want to find out what triggers my external hard drives to spin up at random times.

Is there a tool to find out what triggers this?

I have defrag turned off for these external drives, so it's not that.


what else in win10 is known to randomly spin up external hard drives?

 

External Hard Drive

Hi John,

We suggest that you try the troubleshooting steps below:

• Open your External Hard Drive file in File Explorer.
• Type the name of the file you want to search on the search box and click Enter.

The file will show up in Search Results and you will be able to move it to the correct folder.

Let us know if you need further help.

 

external hard drive spins up randomly. How to find trigger?

We need a sense of direction please

Post #1 "i want to find out what triggers my external hard drives to spin up at random times."
--- How many external HDD's are you using and what is the purpose of each one of them?
--- Please post a disk management screenshot

Moving on

Post #6 "There is just no reason for any queries to these external hdds."
--- There is a reason for whatever "triggers my external hard drives to spin up at random times."
--- Maybe each one of the external HDD's need to be evaluated based on "what is the purpose of each one of them"

"my only guess is maybe google chrome is doing something?"
--- Please explain why you suspect "maybe google chrome is doing something"

"it's as if Windows just spins up the drives to see if they're alive."
--- With whatever is going on, there are reasons the drives spin up.

"In fact, I just set "turn off hard disk after 1 minute" in power options, and after windows spins up the drive, it spins down after 1 minute, so that suggests Windows doesn't actually need to do anything with these hdds."
--- If "Windows doesn't actually need to do anything with these hdds", what are you using them for?