Hard drive keeps spinning up - filemon shows nothing accessing the drive

[Zootal]

I have a box with a hard drive that is not used, ie. there are no programs
installed and no running processes should access it. I have hard drive spin
down set to ten minutes. After 15 minutes or so, the disk spins up. I'm
running file monitor to see who/what is accessing it, and nothing is
accessing it. What would cause a drive to spin up on a regular basis when
there is no file access?

 

[VanguardLH]

I have a box with a hard drive that is not used, ie. there are no programs
installed and no running processes should access it. I have hard drive spin
down set to ten minutes. After 15 minutes or so, the disk spins up. I'm
running file monitor to see who/what is accessing it, and nothing is
accessing it. What would cause a drive to spin up on a regular basis when
there is no file access?

Even if there are no files on it, file indexing is still going to look
there to see if there are any to interrogate. Do you have file indexing
enabled or installed a similar utility (MS Search, Google Desktop)?

Do you use Avira's Antivir as your anti-virus program? It has had an
over 2-year old defect on some hosts where it misinterprets a query on a
disk device (to find out what type of device it is) as an access to its
media. The result is that it polls the floppy or external drive once
per minute although no process is accessing files there. Once the
floppy or external drive is accessed, Avira accesses it once per minute.
I don't remember all the possible workarounds, including a reboot, but
the problem would return the moment anything looked at that device.
Some such programs are CD burning programs to go querying devices to see
if they are fixed or removable drives, like Nero, or utilities that
gather SMART data from hard drives, like Speedfan. Avira Antivir
doesn't have this problem on all hosts; however, where it occurs the
only way to get rid of it is to uninstall Avira and go with a different
anti-virus program.

 

[Zootal]

Even if there are no files on it, file indexing is still going to look
there to see if there are any to interrogate. Do you have file indexing
enabled or installed a similar utility (MS Search, Google Desktop)?

Do you use Avira's Antivir as your anti-virus program? It has had an
over 2-year old defect on some hosts where it misinterprets a query on a
disk device (to find out what type of device it is) as an access to its
media. The result is that it polls the floppy or external drive once
per minute although no process is accessing files there. Once the
floppy or external drive is accessed, Avira accesses it once per minute.
I don't remember all the possible workarounds, including a reboot, but
the problem would return the moment anything looked at that device.
Some such programs are CD burning programs to go querying devices to see
if they are fixed or removable drives, like Nero, or utilities that
gather SMART data from hard drives, like Speedfan. Avira Antivir
doesn't have this problem on all hosts; however, where it occurs the
only way to get rid of it is to uninstall Avira and go with a different
anti-virus program.

I use this box for my half-life server, and there is next to nothing
installed on it. Indexing service is disabled. No Google Desktop, no MS
Search. No anti-Virus. Besides, wouldn't all of these would show up in
filemon? Specifically, I'm using Sysinternals file monitor to watch for any
access at all.

Are there other services that typically run that could cause this?

 

[Zootal]

I use this box for my half-life server, and there is next to nothing
installed on it. Indexing service is disabled. No Google Desktop, no MS
Search. No anti-Virus. Besides, wouldn't all of these would show up in
filemon? Specifically, I'm using Sysinternals file monitor to watch for
any access at all.

Are there other services that typically run that could cause this?

I've been watching this for a couple of days, and it seems to be about 30
minutes. Every half hour, all hard drives that have spun down will spin back
up. I've stopped every service that I can do without. No task scheduler, no
indexing, etc. And still. something spins it back up with nothing showing in
file monitor. What else am I missing?

 

[VanguardLH]

Zootal wrote ...

I've been watching this for a couple of days, and it seems to be about 30
minutes. Every half hour, all hard drives that have spun down will spin back
up. I've stopped every service that I can do without. No task scheduler, no
indexing, etc. And still. something spins it back up with nothing showing in
file monitor. What else am I missing?

What is a half-life server?

This other drive isn't part of a RAID setup, is it?

Just to be sure, check if any filter was configured in SysInternal's
FileMon. I've used the filter before and then forgotten to revert to
"*" for the filespec when I wanted to see everything. FileMon remembers
the filter you specified when you previously ran it.

Are you running anything that access the S.M.A.R.T. data on the disk?
For example, I use Speedfan to monitor and slowdown the fans so they are
quieter (with thresholds as to when to speed up the fans to keep the
computer properly cooled). It has a SMART monitor which will query
drives to get that data (and why Avira's AntiVir was screwing up). Why
would SpeedFan be monitoring the disk? Because some disks can report
their temperature and SpeedFan is about regulating temperature through
control of the fans. My newer SATA drive can record its temperature
range but not my older IDE drive.