I was forced to finally install the Creators update in order to download/install Forza 7 and it has resulted in nothing but headaches. I have always set my storage drives to sleep after 5 minutes of inactivity and before the update they would stay asleep forever unless I accessed them. After the update Windows accesses them at random times or whenever I launch an app/game. I have searched all over the net for solutions for an entire week and done countless tweaks to the OS but nothing has completely solved the problem and it looks like a lot of others have had the same issue as well.
The one thing that has made a huge difference in how frequently it happens was installing a separate antivirus so Defender becomes disabled. That has cut the frequency to once an hour or when I open apps/games, instead of every 15 minutes.
I was so discouraged that I bought another SSD and did a clean install of W10, including the Creators update but it still continued to access my drives at random, waking them up over and over.
Anyone had this issue and found a solution? This never happened before I installed the Creators update so I’m assuming something it installed is the gremlin that’s causing this problem. The one thing I had seen over and over with all my time researching was that it was possibly a service related to telemetry that needed to be disabled but I never saw anyone say what specific one. I’m all out of ideas at this point.
Any programs you could think of accessing the drives? Steam, or something simmilar?
Do you by chance have anything made by MSI in your system? I had this problem with some of the MSI programs that installed with my GPU drivers and it was causing constant drive access and this issue after the creator’s update.
That’s why I did the full clean install of Windows 10 and the Creators update to circumvent this possible issue. I monitored the system for a couple hours after the install and it was still doing it before and after installing all the chipset/device drivers. I’m all out of ideas and have since been spending most of my time back on my Windows 8 build. Maybe I will go out of my way to buy a HD switch panel to turn them off when I am on the Windows 10 side because I really don’t think it’s very healthy for them to cycle off and on so many times per hour.
You could check resource monitor and see if you can see what process is using the disk during those times of high activity. It might at least give you a clue. Unfortunately if its telemetry, Windows has hidden most of that stuff under normal System processes so it may be hard to be sure if its telemetry or not.
Have you checked event viewer logs as well? You might find a clue there as well.
Edit: I forgot to ask if you tried safe mode to see if the issue persists. If not, in the task manager, try disabling all the startup items and reboot normally and see if the issue returns. If not, try enabling half the startup items and check again. Keep going by halves to narrow things down.