I have been trying to find out which process keeps spinning up one of my disks. It is a noisy disk so I prefer it not spinning when it doesn't have to.
I have tried with all sorts of filters using Process Monitor (the sysinternals tool) and have stopped some processes, yet the disk is spun up regularly.
I have even disabled NTFS' Last Access update timestamp (system wide setting) but that wasn't it.
Now I have used Computer Management to put the disk Offline when not in use, and even then it was spun up! This means something has disk level access and not just file level access (as the disk has no more drive letter).
Looking in the Even Viewer I can see mrcbt complained a lot when I put the disk offline and that is a Macrium software component. 

So my question, is it Macrium that keeps spinning my disk up? 

And how do I make Macrium stop doing that? It is not the disk it backs up nor is it the target of the backup files.

I would hate it if putting the disk offline is the only way to stop whatever it is spinning it up. My suspicion is on Macrium due to the many complaints in the Event Log and because it is the only low level tool that I use. Windows itself usually does not cause this problem.

This is one of the errors from Macrium in the event log:

Failed to write to the tracking file on device \Device\HarddiskVolume8 (F with status 0xC00000A2

F: is the drive that gets spun up. Why would Macrium write to that drive? How do I make it stop?

If you suspect it could be CBT accessing the volume, you could try temporarily uninstalling the feature and see if the disk stops randomly spinning back up.  If it does, then you can pretty much guess it's CBT that is spinning up the drive.

...or under the Local Disks TAB, just <click> on your "F" partition, and hit the "Actions..." DropDown.  If CBT is enabled just disable it.  No need to turn CBT completely off...

I thought there was a way to disable it on a partition but I wasn't sure how to do it.  Plus, I figured if one wanted to isolate if CBT was a culprit, I thought it best to temporary remove the feature entirely.

I think ResMon can help diagnose OP's issue as well.

                                

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Froggie - 11 September 2022 2:40 PM

...or under the Local Disks TAB, just <click> on your "F" partition, and hit the "Actions..." DropDown.  If CBT is enabled just disable it.  No need to turn CBT completely off...

I have been trying to find this tab, but have not been successful. Where do I find it? In which program?
Also, I do not have an F: drive when the disk is in offline mode, yet something still spins it up.
ProcessMonitor is nice and all, but cannot monitor drive activity, only filesystem activity (of which I have none).

The "Local Disks" tab is available in Reflect version 8:




I see that you've posted in the Version 7 forum, so you'll find the "Actions" dropdown on the main screen of the Backup tab:


However, I'm not sure if v7 offers the ability to enable/disable CBT from the Actions dropdown.


In your top post, you said that "F: is the drive that gets spun up.", and that Reflect logs an error message that mentions drive F:.


I had suggested ResMon, not ProcMon.  ResMon has a tab for Disk activity.



                                

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JK - 17 September 2022 12:46 PM

The "Local Disks" tab is available in Reflect version 8:




I see that you've posted in the Version 7 forum, so you'll find the "Actions" dropdown on the main screen of the Backup tab:


However, I'm not sure if v7 offers the ability to enable/disable CBT from the Actions dropdown.

Also, I do not have an F: drive

In your top post, you said that "F: is the drive that gets spun up.", and that Reflect logs an error message that mentions drive F:.

ProcessMonitor is nice and all

I had suggested ResMon, not ProcMon.  ResMon has a tab for Disk activity.

VI doesn't seem to be able to configure which drive cbt monitors.

Well, I do have an F: drive, but when the disk is offline, the driver letter is no more. I set it offline to eliminate all file based disk accesses.

I used Process Monitor as it gives more details than resource monitor (that can only monitor file based access; same as resource monitor really). There is a diskmon application from sysinternals but it cannot tell which application is causing the access and it has poor filtering.