Whenever I start steam I have an annoying issue where it wakes up my secondarily hard drive. There is nothing steam related on the drive yet it insists in accessing it anyway.
I tried changing the drive letter thinking maybe something in the software was pointed at the current one but that did not work. I do not see anything in the setting that seems like it could help. If anybody knows how to turn this off in steam or maybe a way to hide the drives existence from the steam app please do tell.
I asked in the steam forum and as you might expect I got nothing but bratty children, people insisting I must be talking about my C drive and then telling me I am stupid for having sleep setting enabled on my drive at all. If that is the response you are planning please just don’t.
I can only share that I investigated the same issue a number of years ago when I had half a dozen hardddrives in my system, most of which were more or less always asleep. There was no way to get the Steam client to stop waking all of the drives back then and am not surprised to hear the client still behaving the same, touching drives it has no reason to.
There isn’t a good solution within the same OS as far as I know… steam even wakes portable drives like USB3.0 attached disks or thumb drives.
I had the same issue when I had 4x 2TB WD green drives in my PC for data storage (BTW, never use greens, they where dog slow and 2 died… WD is fine, but get reds). Now I use homemade NAS for that and steam doesn’t wake it, so if like like me your not installing games onto it directly, the gigabit connection isn’t a binding restriction for bandwidth to limited numbers of spinning rust and I don’t notice any real latency over the normal seek times. Best of all if your going to have a raid or ZFS2 array it won’t be disturbed if you crash your main PC, either by doing something dumb in software, pulling out the cord with your foot (I killed a 2x 320gb raid a long time ago like that) or overclocking. I also now use a 5.25" external hot swap bay for doing cold disk backup, and also highly recommend that as a solution.
You can however solve this by running steam in a VM (either from a hypervisor like Xen or within your primary OS like virtualbox), and passing through your graphics. This is a good solution if you also want win10 apps but also privacy, and won’t cost any more if you have unused integrated graphics (though if not somebody in these forums got a $5 ultra low power display adapter that worked also, forget who). The win10 can also even read the same drives if you like, just as vitalized networking. Its more work, more of a pain in the ass and wastes some performance, but its about the only other way I can think of to solve it right now.