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.
