I've seen this question asked many times, even here, but that was 10 years ago.
- Primary drive: Samsung SSD
- Secondary drive: Seagate Barracuda
I'm on Linux Mint now but when I had Windows 10 installed it was spinning up my empty secondary hard drive (NTFS) for no reason. I've searched answers and it all comes down to indexing, power plan and similar. Nothing helped, I believe it's hard coded into Windows and user can't turn it off.
Also, when it's inactive and I enter the HDD I can hear it spin up, probably because it's activating it. But what's strange to me is that Linux doesn't do this. I can't hear the drive at all wheater I'm using it or not, creating folders or not, it's silent and it works. Note: It's a new Seagate Barracuda 1TB. One more thing, once windows is done and I'll call it "scanning/collecting metadata" from my HDD it slows down and stops spinning I guess as I can hear it like higher pitched screech/scratch sound when it stops.
That's the best I could describe it since as I said, this is not happening on Linux Mint, no spinning, sounds etc...
As I'm on Linux (secondary HDD is ext4 now) I'm not really trying to fix anything but I'm rather interested in what on Earth is Windows doing with my secondary HDD. This has happened in the past with different drives, although I can't rebember if the HDD had scratch-like-high-pitch sound when it stops.
I'm not an expert but my thought process is that Linux might manage power and access to drives differently than Windows and since I can use Catfish program on Linux on my secondary HDD without even hearing it spin so I doubt that it's HDD failure.
Does anybody have any opinion on this? Will Windows's behaviour reduce the lifespan of HDD if I use it?