This is more about curiosity rather than practical advice. I have an old dying SATA HDD, has some bad clusters and can't be fixed. I plugged it into my computer to copy some data off it, all went well, this was a week ago. Now I still have it connected, basically I just got busy and haven't made the time to yank it out.
Now the odd thing I'm curious about is that ever since I plugged it in, my computer has been sorta soft freezing every now and then. By freezing I mean that whatever program I'm using becomes nonresponsive for a minute and I can hear the HDD making noise, then the noise stops and things resume as normal. The thing is though - none of what I do has anything to do with that HDD!
The reason why I blame windows for this is because this drive is from a centos server to which I often remote into and this kind of freezing was not there, I certainly would have noticed if that was the case. On the centos server, it would only freeze sometimes when accessing the drive directly, never while doing random unrelated stuff.
So how come windows is triggering this freeze so frequently that it makes me think it must be accessing that drive nonstop?