Solved External HD of Laptop being mysteriously accessed by system.

[MickyLuv]

My Dell laptop running Win7 Pro has a 1.5 TB SATA drive attached by USB. I use this as my main data archive. Recently the drive has started to be accessed for long periods of time for no apparent reason when the computer is not actively in use.

The drive is very noisy with much clickety-clacking when being accessed. Consequently I'm trying to decide which is more disturbing, the paranoia arising from the fact that my data is perhaps being accessed by an unknown entity, or the stress of being woken from my slumbers at 3AM in the morning by something resembling a passing freight train. A damned long one at that.

I tried turning off the Windows Search service in an attempt to prevent indexing of the drive but to no avail.

The drive accessing always seems to stop soon after I tap the touchpad of the laptop, cancelling the screen blanker and displaying the desktop.
Please can anyone tell me how I might prevent this unwanted phenomenon?

Kind regards,

MickyLuv

 

[UsernameIssues]

Welcome to the Seven Forums.

You can use the native Resource Monitor to see what app is hitting that drive.

Start > Resource Monitor - select the tab named Disk

 

[pscowboy]

Disk defragmenter is probably on.

Go to Start - (type in) defrag - (near the top) - Disk Defragmenter

Check the schedule. You can tell the app not to defrag.

I would also advise you to knock off indexing on that drive. It's there to hasten searches, but todays' fast hardware kind of negates that usefulness.
Right-click the drive - Properties. At the bottom, uncheck "Allow files ......" Apply - OK.

If you have a lot of stuff in there, the process will take some time. Possibly 2 hours or so.

 

[MickyLuv]

Thanks for the help guys, the problem was the default scheduling of defrag on the drive. Problem solved. Thanks again. MickyLuv

 

[UsernameIssues]

Disk defragmenter is probably on.

Go to Start - (type in) defrag - (near the top) - Disk Defragmenter

Check the schedule. You can tell the app not to defrag.

I would also advise you to knock off indexing on that drive. It's there to hasten searches, but todays' fast hardware kind of negates that usefulness.
Right-click the drive - Properties. At the bottom, uncheck "Allow files ......" Apply - OK.

If you have a lot of stuff in there, the process will take some time. Possibly 2 hours or so.

...and we have a winner:

Thanks for the help guys, the problem was the default scheduling of defrag on the drive. Problem solved. Thanks again. MickyLuv

Glad that you got it solved. You can get some sleep now.