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