Basically, after installing the latest couple of updates KB4019264 and KB4019112 I reboot then later in the day I had noticed constant drive access, as I could hear the disk ticking away, I checked the resource monitor and almost nothing, on average around 20-50k total access from the system, chrome and various processes and I was unable to determine the cause (or even tell for sure which drive was making the noise), reboot and it's still doing it, so I used system restore to return to the state before those updates worried I may have a more serious issue with my drive and now it's back to normal, no more ticking or arm wiping noises, what? why??
I had to make sure I even have those updates installed. No strange behaviour here.
Running 200 win 7 devices at work and 9 at Home- no Problems here . Check maybe for the update readiness tool and windows search Engine. Both are prone in my experience to cause such issue.
I have had no issues with Windows 7 64 bit at all on two machines and I run updates.
Sometimes these updates are quite extensive and with that comes a tremendous amount of writing and re-organizing the sectors on the hard drive. This can cause the internals of the hard drive to wear out. My bet is that you updated your computer, but your hard drive has also come to the end of its stable lifespan since you are now hearing the infamous write-arm dance all all over the place - ticking.
You're best bet is to mirror the hard drive with a new one and retire the old one; it is on a matter of time before that hard drive stops ticking for good.
Well I don't think so, by ticking I mean the that sound most drives make when you're copying files or whatever (but less active than that).
Also seems as if you may have missed this part:
Yeah it's been working fine now, drives goes to sleep after about 40 minutes, silence and slight update I accidently installed KB4019264 again (downloading drivers through windows update) and no issues but if you like here is my SMART data.
Not great but nothing too serious just yet and I had a slightly different issue with drive E where it was making a windshield wiper type of noise, I eventually figured out it only ever did that if I ran Ashampoo HDD Control 2017 it was very odd.
Hmmmm...my mechanical drives do not tick, at all.
I suspected the new drive state, with the updates, was moving the write arm to its limits, and causing the noise. Restoring to a previous point would not have the arm moving to those points. Hence, no noise when you restored to an earlier image.
Anyhoo...just my two cents. You do you.
Allow me to clarify, I had installed the updates sometime early in the day, then much later at between 12 and 1AM I noticed this constant disk access, which lasted until about 2 or 3 when I restored, I checked all the typical stuff like indexing, defrag, AV scans nothing, just completely random.
A few explanations for why they make noise, these drives are a bit old (especially F notice it has 5 years of power on hours), another reason is AAM might not be as effective as it is on new drives also I did play with the setting a little, although they should be back to stock settings, lastly drive E is an enterprise drive and doesn't have AAM, so it always makes clicky sounds when it's busy, but my issue sounded more muted so it must have been D or F.
I'd love to replace all three of them with new 3TB drives but I can't do that right now.
Dunno if you guys have heard the news yet, but there is a nasty piece of ransomware spreading all over the place right now, so just to be safe I went ahead and reinstalled KB4019112 and made sure I have all the latest updates, thankfully so far it hasn't immediately caused my drive to do anything weird like before, so I guess I may have just gotten a bug or something.
Alright, I have good news and bad news.
Bad - I just had this happen to me again, causing a slight panic as I try to figure out what is causing this.
Good - It definitely wasn't the updates that caused my issue and it thankfully has quickly ended this time around, my initial search for the cause lead me to believe it may have been something to do with my DCOMLaunch settings as this seems fairly similar to my symptoms I was experince, although using Process Monitor it appears that it could've been Veeam Endpoint doing something weird when it should be idle or a process from MSI super charger was causing it.
It's hard to tell, especially since I don't use Process Monitor all that often, but there was a lot of registry activity.