BD client is regularly waking sleeping mechanical drives for no reason?

At this stage, this is only a possible BD fault. I’ve not conclusively proven this is caused by BD (yet)

I have two large mechanical drives which are set to sleep after 10mins. They don’t contain programs or anything that should regularly be accessed. I can sometimes go a whole week without accessing any data for them, but they are permanently in my system rather than being in a NAS or external enclosure. They don’t contain paging files, when they are asleep (in theory) they should remain asleep.

In the last couple of weeks, I’ve noticed them spinning up very frequently. The click and wurr sound as they start up is quite noticeable as my system is pretty quiet otherwise. I started recording how often it was occurring as it seemed often, but maybe I was imagining it. After taking a log for a day or so it was apparent the drives were being woken every 30-50mins, never exactly the same time – but it was regularly.

I used process explorer to try to trace what was causing it, but couldn’t consistently see a read pattern which coincided with when the drives were woken. It’s almost as if a wakeup command is sent to the drives without any actually reading from the drives occurring.

Of course, it could be a problem introduced by a Windows update, but I decided to try some of the many suggestions you can find online if you find your sleeping drives being woken like this. I started by removing all shortcuts from my desktop. Next I disabled Hard Disk Sentinel. I then turned off indexing for all drives and even disabled the index service. Then I went onto disabling programs which run all the time, like steam, mouse manager etc. None of it made any difference and the drive waking continued. Finally, this morning I uninstalled BD, and so far, the drives have not been woken.

This is still early days having only done it a few hours ago, but this drive waking has been happening constantly and it is quite noticeably absent as soon as I uninstalled BD

Please note that I had drive-exclusions in place for all mechanical drives in the BD client settings. Also, this drive waking may have been going on longer than a couple of weeks, but I only noticed it was going on in the last couple

I don’t recall a BD client update in the last couple of weeks, but I think I did have a Windows version update recently. Maybe the Windows major update triggered something to change with how BD behaves?

NB: Sorry I don’t have the BD client version to give as I’ve now uninstalled it. It was whatever is the latest desktop client version of Internet security for Windows (as of 28 March 2023)

I will come back and update this thread with further info if I find it wasn’t BD after all. I may reinstall BD again but it’s nice to have a quiet system again for a while, so I may not do it until later this week

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Alexandru_BD

Hello @Ironbuket and welcome back to the Community! 🙂

Normally, if you set drive-exclusions for all mechanical drives, Bitdefender should not access them. Do you have any scheduled scans set? To find out if the wake is indeed caused by Bitdefender, we would need to know what process is doing this and we can't possibly know without looking at some logs. My recommendation is to contact our Support engineers, because they need to gather more information from the device. We won't be able to set an accurate diagnosis on the forum, because we don't have the required tools to do this.

You can use the below link to choose your desired contact channel:

https://www.bitdefender.com/consumer/support/help/

Please do keep us updated on the investigation.

Regards

Ironbuket

Thanks for the reply. No scheduled scans. Like I said Im not sure it is BD. The drive has since been woken up after I posted above, but far less than when BD was on there. After well over an hour to two hours between them, compared to often 30min frequency with BD installed.

It may well be an issue which originates with Windows or even something else.

I already tried to trace the ID with process explorer and it seemed like it may be a Windows related process which led me down the drive indexing route. However, it is hard to check exactly as the only way I worked out how to do this is to run process explorer and then video capture my screen. I then set a timer and stop it when I hear the drives spin up, then stop the recording and go forward in the recording to the stopped time point to try and see any drive reads.

Prior to attempting this, I read several accounts of people trying to do the same with process explorer in the past and how tricky it is to ever find out what is causing this kind of thing other than just removing programs and services one by one until you see a change.

I saw a change when I removed BD. Im not saying it is BD's fault, but one of the previous issues I reported ended up being caused by a Windows change which caused unexpected problems with the client.

I made this post to fish and see if anyone else might be seeing the same, as much as for any other reason

Alexandru_BD

Cool @Ironbuket 👍️

Ironbuket

Quick update on this:

It doesn’t appear to be something caused directly by BD and is most likely originating from a windows process (I think). Windows defender, which Window defaulted to after uninstall BD, may account for the reduction in occurrences and it could still be an AV to OS related issue. I’ve been struggling with process explorer and task manager for the past day trying to track down the exact cause, but sometimes it can be up to 2hrs before it does it. Ive just put BD back on because WD was annoying me and couldn’t be bothered to install MB.

The drive waking doesn’t seem to coincide with a read – at least not every time. E.g. occasionally there is no read/write entry recorded in resource monitor even though the drive just got woken by something

At this stage I have given up and decided to just turn off sleep on the drives. I might return to investigate more in the future, but it’s just taking too long and I have better things to do. Only thing wasted is electricity, they don’t make much noise being on all the time, it’s the drive wake/spin-up noise that is annoying. Sorry Greta

Alexandru_BD

Ah.. Greta 😅

I'm relieved to know BD is not the culprit here, good investigation nevertheless.. 😁