Post upgrade - hard disk spinning up/down?

Since upgrading to Windows 10 my main storage drive, a Samsung Spinpoint F3, seems to be clicking and spinning up and down a lot, as if it's going into a power saving mode - but I have all the power management for the drive that I can find turned off, and it even does it when I play a video from that drive, causing the playback to hitch.

It definitely wasn't doing this under Windows 7.

Anyone having a similar problem?

I have a pair of spinpoints in a RAID array and had this same issue with the technical preview and now the release version of Windows 10. Like you, this didn't happen under 8 or 8.1 either.

My drives constantly click as they come out of power saving mode.

I've turned all power saving measures off, even using Intel RST and Crystaldisk but to no avail.

Odd.

Before upgraded to Windows 10, my 2TB WD Black hard drive reached 99% nearly all time on Windows 8.1 but amazing now on Windows 10 my hard drive never reached 99%.



It sat on 0% most time which used to be same heavy activity on Windows 8.1.

I replaced the Spinpoint F3 with a Seagate SSHD and the problem's gone. It also doesn't affect my backup drive, an old Seagate Barracuda. I have another PC with a Spinpoint F3 that I still need to upgrade to Windows 10, I'll hold off in hopes of a patch or a firmware update.

Yes it seems to be isolated to the spinpoint F3. All of mine did it in the preview and in the full release. Odd that it doesn't seem to occur on any other drive I have though.

Hmm, I have two of them and un-Raided them to install Windows 10 on my new SSD.
They also made the clicking noise randomly at times.

I thought they were dying due to being three years old so I bought a new 1TB drive and installed that.

I've solved the issue!

It's to do with the new Intel RST drivers that we're forced to use on Windows 10 and would've occurred had you updated to the latest RST on 7/8/8.1 too.

Download HDD Guardian to find the /dev/csmiX,Y location of the relevant drive(s).

Next, download a tool called Smartmontools and install it.

Now, open windows task scheduler and click "Create Task"

- Click run with highest priveleges
- Click the "Triggers" tab
- Click "New"
- In the dropdown menu at the top, set it to "At logon of any user"
- Click the "Actions" tab
- Click "New"
- Action should be set to "Start a program"
- Click "Browse"
- Browse to the location you installed smartmontools (probably "C:\Program Files\smartmontools\bin\smartctl.exe")
- In the "Add arguments" section, add the following -s apm,off /dev/csmiX,Y (where X,Y are the values found in HDD guardian)
- Repeat this process (adding another action) once more if you have a second drive

This will run on startup and disable APM which is causing the clicking noises you're experiencing with this drive.

Hope this helps, took me a good few hours of playing around to figure out what to do.

Well done on coming up with a fix and thanks for letting us know! I'll use it on my other PC when I upgrade it to 10.