HDD spins up randomly

[Bill in SD, CA]

I have 2 boxes in my office - my main one (2K) and my 98/2K that I use for storage and general screwing around with.

I've noticed that periodically the HDD spins up for no apparent reason.

It's set to shut down the drives after 30 minutes.

It's not that I use it a lot.

Sometimes over a week with no reason to go on it.

Any ideas why it decides to suddenly spin up?

It is networked.

Bill

[tony_j15]

You saying that the drive is in sleep mode and it spins up? My guess is it is receiving something over the network, general housekeeping stuff.

[jmichna]

Could potetially be a bunch of things...

I think the NT boxes periodically index files on all the drives they are mapped to, for faster retrieval. NT boxes also scan networks for (instructions for) tasks to be run on the local box. You may also be seeing temporary page file data being written back to disk, or ram-held data being written back to disk.

Have you ruled out any spyware or trojans phoning home? Network intrusions by outsiders?

[Bill in SD, CA]

You may be right about the mapped drives.

I didn't think of that.

Viruses and trojans are not likely. Hardly on the net with this box.

Right now I'm in 98 so I will re-boot into 2K and see what logs are being generated.

Bill