T520 unused drive spins up occasionally

[MikalE]

Sometimes the second hard drive in the Ultrabay spins up for no discernable reason. I'm currently using the 500GB SSD with Windows 7 Pro 64. The spinner drive has a copy of Linux Mint.

If that spinner drive is not being used, what causes it to just randomly spin up? I can't even access the drive while Windows is running. Why would it do this?

It spins down after several minutes of running with no input from me.

Is the disc manager software checking on the drive health or is something else happening I don't understand? I haven't found this problem described on the internet anywhere. Apparently it's not common to have two independent drives running two different OS's on the same computer.

[rkawakami]

Probably the same reason why, on occasion, my WinXPP SP3 A31p pings the empty diskette drive attached to the port replicator. My guess is that the OS, or maybe the antivirus program, is scanning all connected hardware drives to see if there are any changes that need to be addressed.

Is the spin down time for the Ultrabay connected hard drive the same as what's defined in the Power Manager / Windows Power Options settings? And what makes you say that you can't access the drive when Windows is running? Is it not listed in Disk Management? Forgive the apparent newbie questions as I've never attempted to have a Linux hard drive connected at the same time Windows was operating.

[MikalE]

It shows up fine under disc management and is healthy. You cannot access it through My Computer. It is not displayed.

I would imagine as you said, it may be the anti-virus or other software checking on the drive health.