What windows service keeps writting to my 2nd HDD in the background?

[newUser8776]

I have an SSD + HDD setup for my HP laptop running Windows 7.

Every time I startup or come out of sleep, my 2nd hard drive keeps spinning up, then shuts off after 4 minutes, then spins up again, then shuts off.... and it does this for about 10 minutes or so. Then, finally, windows realizes i'm not currently writting anything to the HDD and it will power down for good until I actually try to access something on it.

My question: What windows process is running every time i startup that tries to access the 2nd drive for so long? and how can I turn that process off so it stops doing this?

I have the hard drive set to sleep after 4 minutes in system settings, so that is why it shuts off then immediately spins up again. But my larger question is why is it spinning up at all? Is there a way to see what Windows is trying to read/write from it? Is it indexing service? Defrag? something else?

It just seems like unnecessary wear and tear, power consumption, and annoying noise when all the OS is on my SSD, and only music and other files are on the HDD.

 

[cl-scott]

My guess would be that the primary culprit is the indexing service. There are likely others, and of course turning off the indexing service could have knock-on effects in other areas.