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I am running Windows 10. I have an extra hard drive in my computer that is only being used for backups which runs nightly. There is no swap on the drive and indexing is disabled on that drive so there is no reason for Windows to need to access the drive. However, I will hear the drive spin up every hour or so, sometimes less, even when the computer sitting idle.

I've tried Process Monitor but sometimes I'll hear the drive spin up, and check and there will be no entries. Sometimes it is a system app like RuntimeBroker.

Is there a way to force Windows 10 to ignore the drive except for the time where my backups runs? Perhaps a way to schedule the drive to be mounted during the backup period then unmount it

eng3
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    Are you looking for something along the lines of [Mount and dismount hard drive through a script/software](https://superuser.com/questions/704870/mount-and-dismount-hard-drive-through-a-script-software)? Or perhaps you could change the noisy drive for an SSD. – Andrew Morton Dec 24 '20 at 14:08
  • yes, that sounds like it might work. Do you think removing the drive letter is sufficient? – eng3 Dec 24 '20 at 14:24
  • As an easy experiment, you could set the drive to offline in Disk Management. Then wait and see if the drive still spins up sporadically - if it does, then I don't think the linked answer in my earlier comment will help. Remember to set it back to online before the backup runs. (I don't have a drive available to test it on myself at this moment.) – Andrew Morton Dec 24 '20 at 14:30
  • Yes, I am trying it now, there is an option to remove the drive letter and an option to completely dismount. I would hope the later would work in the worst case. I was just asking incase you happened to know. I can easily script this into my existing robocopy scripts. Ofcourse the most ideal solution would be preventing windows from randomly accessing my drives, but that's alot harder to figure out. – eng3 Dec 24 '20 at 14:33

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