1

I am running Windows 10.

I have a WD blue HDD which I use to store video clips and nothing else. When it hasn't been accessed in a while, it goes to sleep. When it's asleep and I go to access the drive in the file explorer there is a short pause and an audible whirring sound as it starts up. This is normal.

I have noticed this same sound at many moments when I wouldn't expect it. For example, I just loaded YouTube in Google Chrome and some icons on the webpage didn't load until the HDD had started up. This makes it seem like the browser is caching webpage UI elements on this HDD for some reason. My OS and all of my programs are installed on a different drive.

Does Windows 10 have some behavior that wakes up drives even if they are not needed for what it's doing? Could this be a weird behavior of Chrome?

Improve this question
7
  • It could just be that something is waiting for the drive, and then the code decides to paint the icons. That is, there may be no relation at all.
    – Rohit Gupta
    Commented Dec 14, 2023 at 6:29
  • Voting to reopen, especially since the OP has no clue why it was closed.
    – Rohit Gupta
    Commented Dec 14, 2023 at 6:30
  • The close feedback is there in the blue box at the top. It specifies not that the question is unclear, but that is either lacks detail OR is unclear: two reasons in one close message. The idea is that both require you to reconsider the question and add details. So, what details can you add? Have you checked the event viewer? Are there other programs that have similar behavior? What testing have you done? If you disconnect the drive and run Chrome do you get similar or different behavior? You've done an ok job describing the symptoms, but have you done and tried and learned regarding this?
    – music2myear
    Commented Dec 14, 2023 at 15:27
  • 3
    A good tool for some decently deep data is ProcessMonitor by Sysinternals, which basically shows a running list of just about everything on your computer. You can run this and set a filter to watch the Chrome processes while that behavior is happening.
    – music2myear
    Commented Dec 14, 2023 at 15:28
  • 1
    To expand on what @music2myear is saying regarding ProcessMonitor.. I myself wouldn't watch chrome processes. Set a filter to watch the root of the drive itself regardless of what process is accessing it. Normally.. a filter like this would be too much but in this case, probably not. Also, even if it is explorer.exe, it might be a 3rd party extension loaded into it and not MS's fault.
    – Señor CMasMas
    Commented Dec 14, 2023 at 18:23

0

Reset to default

You must log in to answer this question.

Browse other questions tagged .