External Hard Drive Constantly Running

[bob09]

This was posted to the hardware forum (http://www.computerhope.com/forum/index.php/topic,134574.0.html), but it hasn't been getting many replies and I think it may be more of a Windows problem than a hardware problem.

I recently re-installed XP SP3 on my old computer and after a few hours of use I touched my external WD Elements and noticed it was running even though I wasn't using any files on it. I only use this drive to store my music and other media. On the previous Windows installation it would spin down whenever nothing was being read from it. This is what shows up when I use Unlocker to see which programs are using it:

It seems like some Windows service is using it, but I have no idea which one.

So far I've disabled indexing and system restore on the drive, but Unlocker shows that svchost.exe is still using the same paths. Any ideas on what to try next?

[DaveLembke]

I know that antivirus's sometimes hold onto drives for realtime protection. Are you running an antivirus, if so which one. I dont know of a way to disable an antivirus's realtime protection of drives without disabling the antivirus itself which  defeats the purpose I having protection. If you ever see activity and your not accessing drive it can be antivirus scanning for issues.

There is also an option under power management to have drives stop spinning after a certain period of inactivity too. I also had a Netgear NAS that as part of the configuration I remember it having a performance or power saving mode and in power saving mode drives would sleep until addressed. This slowed the response time to get data since the drive had to spin up and the data read etc, but was better than wasting a small amount of electricity and having hard drives constantly spinning in an environment where we had 2 cats that would climb around the computers and occasionally knock something over. A drive that is not spinning is safer than one that is spinning when the drive gets jarred.

Did your drive come with any configuration software which might have options for performance or energy saving to which you might be able to configure it through the OEM external drive manager like my NAS had.

[bob09]

I know that antivirus's sometimes hold onto drives for realtime protection. Are you running an antivirus, if so which one. I dont know of a way to disable an antivirus's realtime protection of drives without disabling the antivirus itself which  defeats the purpose I having protection. If you ever see activity and your not accessing drive it can be antivirus scanning for issues.

I currently don't have any antivirus installed.

There is also an option under power management to have drives stop spinning after a certain period of inactivity too. I also had a Netgear NAS that as part of the configuration I remember it having a performance or power saving mode and in power saving mode drives would sleep until addressed. This slowed the response time to get data since the drive had to spin up and the data read etc, but was better than wasting a small amount of electricity and having hard drives constantly spinning in an environment where we had 2 cats that would climb around the computers and occasionally knock something over. A drive that is not spinning is safer than one that is spinning when the drive gets jarred.

My power options were set to never turn the hard drives off, so I'll change that and see if it makes a difference. I also have cats that are a little too nosy. They're a big motivation to keep my drives off. The slow response time is a small price to pay for safer files.

Did your drive come with any configuration software which might have options for performance or energy saving to which you might be able to configure it through the OEM external drive manager like my NAS had.

Nope, it just came with the drive and its cables. Nothing came on the drive either.

[TechnoGeek]

Most of those locked files are System Restore and other files locked by the service. If you disable System Restore/System Protection on the drive, that should make that problem go away. Don't worry about messing things up; if you just store files on the drive then having system restore turned on on it doesn't really benefit you much anyway.

[truenorth]

If you are unable to get a software function to solve the issue here is what i do with my externals.Like you they are very function specific and not always required. If i have been using it when i shut my computer down (after the shut down is complete) i manually turn off the power to the external. If on the next instance of use of the computer there arises a desire to access the external i turn it on by the switch,if not i leave it off. It can often go for many days before i find a need to power it up. The downside to this is that when powering it on it takes the time for the drives (mine is partitioned) to be read and to deal with the windows that open asking what it is you want to do with the drives.Other than that it works well for me.truenorth

[bob09]

Most of those locked files are System Restore and other files locked by the service. If you disable System Restore/System Protection on the drive, that should make that problem go away. Don't worry about messing things up; if you just store files on the drive then having system restore turned on on it doesn't really benefit you much anyway.

I've already disabled system restore. It removed the System process, but the three svchost.exe processes are still running. How do I disable system protection?

If you are unable to get a software function to solve the issue here is what i do with my externals.Like you they are very function specific and not always required. If i have been using it when i shut my computer down (after the shut down is complete) i manually turn off the power to the external. If on the next instance of use of the computer there arises a desire to access the external i turn it on by the switch,if not i leave it off. It can often go for many days before i find a need to power it up. The downside to this is that when powering it on it takes the time for the drives (mine is partitioned) to be read and to deal with the windows that open asking what it is you want to do with the drives.Other than that it works well for me.truenorth

That will be a last resort for me. I use the files on this drive very often and share it across my home network.


After some googling I learned that $Extend/$ObjId is used by the distributed link tracking service. I disabled it and just like that the drive is no longer being used by svchost.exe. I think it's because I had copied the contents of my old drive onto it before re-installing Windows, so there were some shortcuts on the drive the service was tracking. Dlt seems like a pretty important service since I'm sharing this computer with someone who doesn't always tell me when he's moving files around, so now the question is: Can I disable the link tracking service just for my external drive?