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How can I prevent my HDDs spinning up randomly?

Anonymous
2025-04-03T08:49:01+00:00

I am trying to have my HDDs stay spun down when not in use. Unfortunately Windows 11 keeps waking them up, even when the computer is idle. OS is Windows 11 Pro x64, fully updated, nothing else installed.

Settings: HDDs power down after 5 minutes in the Power Saving power plan.

Things I have tried:

  1. The following registry settings: 
     [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\StorPort]
 "TelemetryPerformanceEnabled"=dword:00000000
 "TelemetryErrorDataEnabled"=dword:00000000
 "TelemetryDeviceHealthEnabled"=dword:00000000
 "LogControlEnable"=qword:00000000
  2. Disable Recycle Bin on all affected drives.
  3. Kill explorer.exe task.
  4. Revosleep. Works but requires manual intervention every time, not of much use to me.
  5. Adding rules to not use Windows Search on affected drives.
  6. Disabling Windows Search service entirely.
  7. "Allow files on this drive to be indexed" checkbox.
  8. Removing unused apps such as Xbox stuff, phone link.
  9. Disable allowing apps to run in the background.
  10. Fully paused Windows update via O&O Shutup10.
  11. Disabled as much telemetry as possible via O&O Shutup10.
  12. Confirmed that virtual memory page file is only on the OS drive, not the affected drives.
  13. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer\NoLowDiskSpaceChecks
  14. Disabled the SysMain service.
  15. Added the affected drives to the Windows Defender exception list.
  16. Scheduled tasks. None are triggering every 10-20 minutes.
  17. Mounted drive to a folder instead of a drive letter (e.g. c:\mnt\drive). Did not make any difference.

Unfortunately the drives still wake up regularly.

I am using Drive Power State to monitor their status. I have tried using Process Monitor with the filter set to the drive waking up to check for applications accessing the disk. Overnight no applications tried to access the affected disk, but it work up anyway, so clearly Process Monitor is not detecting what is causing it to wake.

I could not find anything relevant in Event Viewer for the times in question.

How can I see what is waking the drives, or stop it happening?

Windows for home | Windows 11 | Files, folders, and storage

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  1. Anonymous
    2025-04-04T07:58:50+00:00

    Well, thousands of HDDs are going to premature landfill, and polar bears are drowning thanks to the increased energy usage, because something in Windows is now broken.

    We are talking about 20 power cycles per day, instead of 1 or 2. Increased heat and wear. I might have to ditch it and switch to Linux to protect my hardware.

    If you don't know how to fix it you should just say so please. I need a solution.

    2 people found this answer helpful.
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  2. Anonymous
    2025-04-03T17:43:37+00:00

    How can it be a third party app on a fresh install of Windows 11 without any additional software?

    And if it is, how do I diagnose it? Sysinternals Process Monitor can't find anything accessing the drives.

    2 people found this answer helpful.
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  3. Anonymous
    2025-04-11T09:02:48+00:00

    I think I have identified 95% of the problems now.

    The main culprit is Microsoft Anti-Malware, as stated in my previous post. However, merely disabling it in the settings or adding exemptions for the affected drives is not enough. You have to really kill it off by setting the Group Policy to disable it, and turning off the anti-tamper mechanism that turns it back on again without your permission.

    So pick your poison, shorten the lifespan of your HDDs or forego malware protection. Thanks Microsoft.

    With that done and the BitLocker and Diagnostic Policy Services disabled, drives sleep most of the. Some stupid things still wake them up, such as opening an RDP session. I am considering switching to VNC, I need to evaluate its security.

    1 person found this answer helpful.
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  4. Anonymous
    2025-04-08T11:43:11+00:00

    I've made a little progress diagnosing it.

    BitLocker Drive Encryption Service - randomly scans HDDs periodically. Only needed when unlocking drives, so you can stop it after boot up and unlocked drives remain accessible.

    Diagnostic Policy Service - I don't know what this nonsense does but it wakes up HDDs regularly. I disabled it and nothing bad happened. It seems to be related to network connectivity, so I have no idea why it accesses my HDDs.

    Micorsoft Anti-Malware, or whatever it's called now, randomly scans drives that haven't had any disk activity, for no reason. Even if you add an exception for them to it, it just ignores you and accesses them anyway. It might be because the exceptions are path based and it is not considering the path for those accesses.

    Related to that, MsMpEng.exe likes to wake up hard drives for no reason too. It appears to be some kind of system file integrity checker.

    For some reason the Shadow Copy Provider service accesses drives periodically. Disabling that could be bad.

    There's more to it, but the bottom line is that too many parts of Windows like to randomly access your hard drives at random times. There is no coordination, and no attempt to check if the drive is active before doing it. Whatever caching is in place is inadequate.

    Basically Windows 11 hates hard drives and loves drowning polar bears. The only solution is a Linux NAS for hard drives, and SSDs only for Windows boxes.

    1 person found this answer helpful.
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  5. Anonymous
    2025-04-03T15:23:45+00:00

    The problem is caused by the use of a third party utility.

    I'm semi retired now and as such my main desktop only has 2 internal ssd's and using bios defaults with Balanced pwr have no such issues.

    Prior to runing down my main desktop had 6x internal drives under win 11 and again had no such issues

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