How to deal with noisy HDD?

I don't suppos you guys are all that knowledgable about Windows 10?

I bought a new laptop. It's running Windows 10. Has an SSD and a HDD. HDD is noisy.

I set the power option in windows to shut down the HDD after one minute of inactivity. HDD goes nice and quiet.
After a few minutes of browsing Sup Forums the HDD started back up again.
Why did it do that and how can I control the system to not activate the HDD unless I actually want to use acess or store something on it?

There's hardly anything installed on the HDD yet. Only Steam and one game.

First, check if there is a page file is on that drive, if there is, disable it.

The nuclear option, short of physically removing it, of course, is to remove it's drive letter in Disk Management.

I unchecked the Atomatically manage page file check box, so now the page file settings look like this. Didn't helped.

Nuclear options are preferably to be avoided if at all possible.

What other things is the system doing in the background that it frequently wants to access the HDD?

disable disk cache in browser

also don't use windows 10, it's gonna start the hdd whenever it desires to do telemetry/updates

But why would the browser be caching to the secondary drive?

Is there no way to control this? It hasn't done any updates today.

I have had the same thing for quite a while now. Always dismissed it as something that just happens, but now I'm curious and would like a solution too.

No paging file on the HDD by default, but I've manually set it like that now. Still no change, though.

I'm also using Win10, but my HDD light is still flashing even if I leave my laptop not connected to the internet for a considerable amount of time... Though strangely it seems to be MORE active when wifi/ethernet is disabled than when connected.

Removing the drive letter in Disk manager did not appear to help at all. Now the system never turns off the HDD.

You're not going to like this answer, but the correct answer is "You can't". Sometimes a fucking HDD will just be noisy all the time and there's not a god damned thing you can do about it except replace it with a Solid State Drive.

Well, fuck. Decently sized SSDs are still expensive.

The HDD is quite when it's not spinning. There should be some way to make it not spin when I don't need it to.

>Decently sized SSDs are still expensive
Not that expensive. I mean more than a cheap HDD, but still.

>There should be
There should be a way to do a lot of things. The modern human species operates almost entirely on greed and incompetence. Some things you just have to either live with dysfunctionally or live without.

We've long since declared HDD access control bankruptcy.

In 1996 it was sort of feasible, but today every standard installation has 20 different processes that will occasionally access the HDD for some kind of indexing/polling/checking/monitoring reason.

And a well used installation has tons more.

Windows itself might wake the disk to do file indexing, to write periodic status updates to the FS journal, to check whether you're running low on disk space, to see if there's files in need of cloud synchronization, or to show the drive's icon/info in a Save As dialog even though you don't plan to save on it.

It's still more than feasible if you install Sup Forumsentoo

I was just about to ask about this. Would Linux alow me better control of my hard drive?
I've been thinking about trying running a dual-boot on this laptop.

Just hit it.
If it doesn't stop being noisy, hit it again. Continue until it's as quiet as you want it to be.

Th- thanks.

>There should be some way to make it not spin
Remove microsofts malware from your computer, you have no control over it until you do.

Insulate it with some magnets to keep the noise from escaping. The magnets help since they attract the noise particles and absorb them.

dont use a internal HDD to store data, its also easier to wipe it

It's probably the automatic defragger. It automatically runs when it believes it won't be in your way. You can turn it off. Or, did the laptop come with a lot of pre-installed bullshit? You may want to look into this. Remove a bunch of that shit, especially the "health check" stuff they usually put on there.

I've got W10 and a drive that auto-shuts down and the thing never starts automatically. It sometimes even shuts down when I'm still having a directory open on it, because I didn't read anything from it in a while. It annoys me I have to wait a second. Having an SSD does that to you.

But your whole problem could also be the NSA of course, so it's better to install gentoo instead, just to be safe. Configuring your OS all day can be fun too.

>Configuring your OS all day can be fun too.
Only if you really know what you're doing.

yes as you would be able to unmount it and mount again whenever needed