I have three different drives from WD: one 18 TB My Book and two 14 TB Elements. All three are formatted to NTFS. All three seem to never go idle. I of course expect them to make noise when I access files on them. But they continue grinding, clicking, doing their thing even when I’m browsing an entirely different drive, even when I have no file-accessing (that I know of) programs open, even when the computer is asleep.
This:
- forces me to:
- unplug and plug back in the drives constantly
- frequently shut down the computer when I would’ve otherwise simply put it to sleep
- shortens the drives’ lifespan (?)
My troubleshooting attempts so far have been:
- enabling Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power for every USB 3 port in the Device Manager
- enabling Sleep timer in WD Drive Utilities and setting it to the minimum value for the My Book drive
Drive Utilities doesn’t support Elements drives, but, regardless, neither attempt fixed the issue for any of the drives.
I’m on Windows 10 22H2.
