Usually I turn on my PC and everything is working fine, but after some time the HDD can start spinning up and down. But sometimes it will work fine for days or even weeks. The spin-up-spin-down cycle can happen once a minute, but sometimes HDD spins up and down very fast, every 2-3 seconds and it won’t stop doing so even if I restarts the PC, if I restart the PC the HDD keeps spinning up and down even during the boot/BIOS screen. I have to turn off the PC to stop it.
Usually the HDD starts behaving like this after my PC was on for some time and I start using the HDD: when I open a folder with pictures on that HDD or start some image or video editing program, that accesses the disk. But sometimes the HDD works fine and nothing seems to trigger that problem. Last time when this problem occurred HDD temperature was at 30° C, so it’s probably not overheating.
The HDD is about 2 years old, SMART data is fine, its health is at 100%. I set my HDDs to never power down in windows power settings. I bought a new SATA cable instead of the old one, it didn’t fix it. I tried using a different power cable from my PSU, it didn’t fix it (in fact if I turn off the PC during that problem and plug in a different power cable from my PSU into that HDD, it can make it worse sometimes - the HDD spins up and down more faster, or instead, it fixes the problem for some time, but the problem comes back eventually, so I suspect there is some relation). I see no errors or warnings in the Windows Event Viewer.
My PSU isn’t that powerful (450W), but usually that HDD is working fine. That problem can occur even if PC is idle (GPU and CPU aren’t being used), my PC doesn’t lock up or restart and other components work fine, so I think it’s not the PSU.
What else can I try?
