Question: Update (solved) The sound was coming from my speakers, that’s all there is to it. While I go to cringe in a small hole for a few weeks I’d like to thank (and beg forgiveness from) everybody who took time thinking about this. Technically Twisty’s comment is the closest to deserving the bounty, but without any actual answers for the question I’m probably not going to award to anyone. Thanks again for the help.
Update 2 I take the disk offline using Disk Management and it still clicks as before. Doers this mean it’s solely a hardware issue? If it’s offline how could the OS be triggering any access? Some sort of motherboard issue?
Update I’m beginning to think this may have something to do with the 2nd disk’s controller. It is quite a cheap drive which I just bought for the space, so perhaps isn’t doing things as well as it could. The only driver installed is the default Window one. This poses a few questions:
Original question
My Window 7 PC has an SSD as the boot disk, containing all program installs and user data, and a secondary HDD which I use to store large files, films and music etc.
When taking literally almost any action on my PC that involves disk access to the 1st disk, the 2nd disk has a burst of activity (it’s quite loud so hard to ignore). In particular, loading web pages will cause constant activity until the page is loaded – I’ve checked with a few different browsers and the results are the same. However, there is no noticeable disk activity when doing nothing (i.e. letting my computer idle), so there is presumably something triggering it.
I’ve done the usual search for culprits – using Process Monitor, Process Explorer and Resource Monitor and can see no trace of any access to the 2nd drive. I even checked that I wasn’t doing anything wrong by creating a few files on the drive – these get picked up by the tools perfectly, but none of the activity heard otherwise is recorded. I tried disabling my anti virus and there is no difference.
Given that I cannot pick up any trace of this activity using the usual tools (I can certainly hear it though!), does anyone have any suggestions as to what might be causing it? Any suggestions as to what I can look for next? Some sort of hardware issue? The disk is brand new.
Any help will be much appreciated 🙂
System information:
- Windows 7 SP1
- Antivirus: Avast 2014.9.0.2021
- Disk 1: OCZ Vertex
- Disk 2: HGST HTS721010A9
Note I do not believe this is a complete duplicate of this question for the following reasons:
I have run a trace in DiskMon but am not sure how to reconcile sector numbers with actual access to the 2nd disk. Perhaps someone could give some advice on this? Does DiskMon monitor all physical disks on the system?
Answer: [based on my comment:]It’s possible the sound isn’t actually coming from your hard drive. I’ve witnessed this same behavior and found the culprit to be nearby speakers, often ones lacking good EMI shielding.