spins floppy disk (& possibly accessses other drives) every 60 minutes

Symptoms:
Since the installation of W7 a few weeks ago, once every 60 minutes (but not at the same time each day) something spins the floppy drive.

Also, sometimes another data drive that spins down with inactivity is started up as well, so it could be that all of the drives (4) are briefly accessed.

Prior to this I was running the same setup in terms of applications, firewall and antivirus under XP and did not have this issue, so my first guess is that it is a W7 component.

What I have tried:
In services.msc I have shut down the Windows Search service, but it makes no difference, so I do not think that it is the SearchIndexer doing this.

I have looked through all of the tasks in the Task Scheduler, but I do not see one that is scheduled to run with this periodicity.

I have also tried having the Process Explorer open on the screen and staring at it the moment that it spins the floppy to see if I could spot a new process that started or one that used a lot of cpu at that moment, but I have not been able to notice anything unusual.

Thank you in advance for your thoughts.

I am indeed using a custom power option - a modified version of Balanced.
I set it to turn off hard disk after 30 minutes.
Also it turns the monitor off after 15 minutes.
Sleep after 180 minutes.

Which setting there could be causing the floppy drive to spin up after 60 minutes?

HarriePateman said:

How is the floppy drive connected to the computer?

If I understand your question correctly, it is connected via the floppy drive connector on the MB (Asus P5N73-CM).

HarriePateman said:

Brilliant. Have you had a look in the BIOS to see if the Peparials are configured correctly.

It might also be an idea to pull the battery on the motherboard to reset the CMOS.

Done now - no impact.

I had periodic accessing of the floppy disk occur on every Windows 7 system I built. I finally just disabled the floppies in the Device manager (some in the BIOS) until I needed them. Not much call for a floppies these days however.

Indeed, not much call for floppies, but whatever is doing this, it is also accessing the hard disks (4). Which means that they are being spun up every hour for nothing after coming to rest through inactivity. This shortens their life unnecessarily, so I would like to get to the root of this.

Someone moved this thread to Hardware after I originally posted it to Performance & Maintenance, but it is clearly a software issue.