I have a Sabrent 5-Bay docking station in which I have placed 4 Sata HDD in it so far.
3 of the 4 HDD run only when I am accessing them or transferring files, while the 4th HDD starts spinning rapidly at various times during the day as if it is completing a major task.
Right now as I write this all 4 drives are mute, but at any moment that fourth drive will start running at a rapid pace like it it going through all the files on the drive checking for errors or transferring data.
It is noisy.
All my drives are Seagate EXOS.
Anybody have an idea why this happens and if it will harm my drive or take away from the max operating lifespan of my drive?
@Ryan K You should check on a hardware forum or reddit for storage and/or hard drives. It's possible that drive has some sort of anti-idle setting or a different power setting. Alternatively, the system it's attached to might be running a scheduled task on it for some reason, which could be software-based.
Same thing happens to me Ryan on my 5-bay Sabrent docking station. I am not technical enough to hold a dialogue or investigate forums or settings.. I just searched here hoping to find an answer with instructions. But I posted just now to corroborate your experience.
(Further, annecdotally, and these long tasks (whatever they might be) happening while I am not even using or performing any actions or data transfers on any of the 5 drives is indeed very noisy, similar kinds of constant "grinding" noise you'd hear when some kind of anti-malware scan is running on a drive going on taking half hour or hour. Mine is connected to an iMac M1.
@Richard Hoefer I will check in on this but the docking station is of a fairly basic design such that it can be impacted by drive and OS/software settings. In some cases, a firmware update may assist, but some aspects could require modification.
@Sabrent I think I have found the problem. I went to the Task Manager and clicked on Drives to see what processes were performing actions and noticed one of my video players which I use was setup to run at startup and it was accessing my drives.
Once I stopped that player and disabled it from running at startup I have not seen this process happen since. The one drive which kept starting up and scanning at random is now silent unless I am accessing it in file explorer to find a file or transfer files.
Thanks for your attention on this!
@Richard Hoefer please note my new reply for a probably solution to your issue as well.
@Ryan K I have, I appreciate you posting back with your findings!
