Stumped - Win 10 keeps waking mech drives even when marked offline

Danny75 · 28 Dec 2017 at 10:53

Normally I can find a solution or workaround for most things by searching the web or trial and error but this has me stumped. The clues as to the culprit are these logs in Event Viewer, which always coincide with the drives spinning up:

svchost (3212,G,0) The beta feature EseDiskFlushConsistency is enabled in ESENT due to the beta site mode settings 0x800000.

svchost (2884,G,0) The beta feature EseDiskFlushConsistency is enabled in ESENT due to the beta site mode settings 0x800000.

taskhostw (5108,G,0) The beta feature EseDiskFlushConsistency is enabled in ESENT due to the beta site mode settings 0x800000.

Windows Search is disabled, Indexing disabled (all drives), Write Caching disabled (on mech drives), Superfetch disabled. Mech drives are an exception in Windows Defender as well. Even happens with the mech drives marked offline, which I find barmy.

In Power Options I have the hard drives set to turn off after 10 minutes (doesn't matter if 1 minute or 20 or anything) but the event keeps turning them on a few minutes after.

Now, the drives aren't unhealthy noisy, but they are a bit noisy. With a quiet fan profile the "hoom.... hoom" is noticeable. I wouldn't mind hearing them when I'm actually writing to or reading from them but not all the time. Aware I could also bungee them to reduce noise, and perhaps will, but I think it would be good/better to find the cause of this as I don't like the idea of the drives unnecessarily being made to work in the first place.

I've heard a third-party app like RevoSleep can spin-down/spin-up the drives manually but it's no longer well supported (or at all) so would prefer a solution within Windows (group edit policy or registry edit or similar).

So if anyone has an idea, please do share. I'm also curious about the values in "(3212,G,0), (2884,G,0),(5108,G,0)". What do they point to?

Danny75 · 28 Dec 2017 at 10:56

@seagate_surfer

Would the techies at Seagate happen to know, or be able to obtain an answer from Microsoft, since this Windows 10 "feature" could impact on whether a user chooses mechanical drives or solid state drives in future?

Danny75 · 28 Dec 2017 at 11:11

Thanks @Rroff, will try Shutup 10, haven't messed with that yet.

Developing a serious loathing of Win 10 as time goes by, unlike with other operating systems where the loathing was just initially until I got used to them. Generally feels like the more I use it, the more it uses me instead.

Danny75 · 28 Dec 2017 at 12:56

After disabling most of the options in Shutup 10 (except email and Defender and a couple of others) and restarting, the "EseDiskFlushConsistency" event still occurred. This time upon startup the same event was listed and some of the entries were preceded with "CCleaner64". So uninstalled CCleaner, and also uninstalled the Microsoft Zune Video package as it was also listed. Rebooted but no joy - still more ESENT entries and corresponding drive waking. Glad to have disabled/uninstalled more unnecessary stuff though. And the fact CCleaner is one thing that uses that feature may provide a clue as to what else is using it. Have now reinstalled CCleaner and disabled all active monitoring of drives (which is on by default) and will keep an eye on it in relation to the issue. But obviously there's something else going on.