I have 2 drives under Windows 7, C: SSD and D: HDD. The HDD is for storing movies/installations and isn't really used much so I've set it to spin down after 5 minutes.

The spin-down works but then every 15 minutes it spins back up as evidently some process is accessing it. That makes a fairly loud sound.

I don't know which process does it, however, as I am not running any which should do it, only some poker clients, Firefox and HM. AVG9 is set to realtime protection but no scheduled scans which would touch D:.

Any suggestions how to find out which process is accessing my HDD? Preferrably, using standard Microsoft/Sysinternals or open source tools, but that may be too much to ask.

I'm not sure if Process Explorer can do that or not. You might try it.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/s.../bb896653.aspx

I did some monitoring with the Sysinternals Process Monitor which was a very good tool for this. The processes accessing the drive are:
wmiprvse.exe
Skype.exe
avgchsva.exe
Explorer.exe

This is only while having some poker sites and HM running and not accessing the drive in any way through user actions.

The screenshot shows E: because that is the HDD, I didn't want to confuse you in my original post.


I now think I cannot make all these processes stop accessing it, my best chance are some user-run batch files to mount-unmount it.

Things are as usual not easy with Windows. To do the unmount I now have to decide whether to use:
a) mountvol - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/l.../cc976820.aspx
b) diskpart - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/l...8WS.10%29.aspx
c) devcon - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/311272

I think mountvol seems the most promising and devcon the last resort option.

Edit - although I read somebody saying mountvol is deprecated so I guess I will start with diskpart.

I'll try diskpart with scripts:

select disk 1
select volume 3
remove letter=e

and

select disk 1
select volume 3
assign letter=e


However not sure it will help as some of them are accessing the drive through \Device. Let's see.

windows 7 has this now, type perfmon in the start bar. click the disk tab there.

Yeah, I looked at that but wasn't smart enough to figure out how to use it for tracking all accesses to Volume2/E:.

Those diskpart scripts help a little bit but still something spins that disk up from time to time. I tried devcon.exe but the ia64 version wouldn't run on my x64 system (strange).

The i386 version doesn't seem to be able to disable the device:
C:\temp\i386>devcon disable *HD103UJ*
IDE\DISKSAMSUNG_HD103UJ 1AA01113\4&19FEAA6C&0&0.1.0: Disable failed
No devices disabled.

I'm out of ideas as I cannot find anything "more powerful" (but still nondestructive) than removing the drive letter in diskpart.