Constant disk access that doesn't show on procmon

[wegtet]

I have a WD Green drive which parks its heads after 8 seconds of inactivity. This is measured by "load/unload cycle count" in SMART, and WD rates the drive for 300,000 cycles. I have accumulated over 15,000 in the span of a few days, which obviously isn't good for drive longevity. I don't have a way to run the tool provided by WD to alter the timeout for the heads, so I need to figure out what is causing this frequent disk access. Prior to whenever this started (I'm assuming it was a few days ago, when I installed a new motherboard) I was averaging 0-10 load/unload cycles per day, depending on how often I accessed the drive.

I checked activity with Resource Monitor and found nothing accessing the drive except for the very occasional access of BCD.log and the MFT. However, I'm seeing ~3-6 load/unload cycles per minute, so something is accessing the drive every 8-20 seconds.

I tried using procmon. I set it to filter only for activity on E:\ (the drive in question) and I unchecked all the default "exclude" filters; I saw nothing besides procmon accessing the drive. I ran it for a good 5 minutes.

The drive is connected to an Intel Z68 SATA II controller. I have no other drives which park their heads so I don't know if this activity occurs on all my drives or not. Again, nothing shows in procmon or Resource monitor. What can I do to see what's accessing the drive?


Tried so far:
Disabling Superfetch
Disabling AV
Disabling Indexing

 

[MilesAhead]

I don't know if it's the same issue. I have an HP Media Center PC running Windows 7. The HD access light flicks on every few seconds. I found from another poster on another forum it has to do with checking if the Optical drive has a disc in it. To test if it's the same issue, go into Device Manager and right click in CD/DVD ROM Drives and click Disable. When I do that, the LED flicker goes away. Seems there's no fix for it.

The work-around may be to image your system onto a WD Caviar Black. I don't trust drives that have a bunch of spin down options. More to go wrong.