Strange Hard Drive Activity

I wonder if this might not be a hardware configuration issue.

My EQ runs as admin and I don't currently have this issue. I am on Win10 1909.

I have a combination of mechanical and solid state drives. EQ resides on an M.2 SATA drive all by itself. Win10 manages my virtual memory. I have 16GB of RAM and run six instances of EQ. Intel i7-7700k and 1070 GTX. I launch my sessions using NoPatch.

I don't know what else to add except you may want to get some software that monitors which apps are accessing your drives.

For now, I've changed the time to sleep on the drives from 20 minutes to 60 minutes. I don't have the time or energy to check if I can track down the reason for this happening.

Thank you everyone for your comments and if I get the time I might try some of your suggestions.

SSD are good for speed, but unreliable for back-up.

Optical solutions are even better for cold storage back-ups.

If you store something on an SSD it's likely going to be gone or corrupted in 5 years if it's not powered on and rewritten sporadically. On a cold HDD it will still be there in 10 years. On an optical disc it can last 100 years or more depending on the disc.

You should easily be able to tell your HDD is waking up out of sleep modus and hear both the spin up of the HDD platters, and the rattling sound from the head moving in place.

The only reason I can think of why you don't hear HDD, is if you have hearing issues, or if you have really loud case fans drowning out the HDD noise.

It's not. It's definitely eqgame.exe, and only when run as admin.

How do you know that?

In my original post, I used Process Monitor to pinpoint which Windows process was enumerating my drives.

Code:

5:02:33.1525159 PM    eqgame.exe    69288    IRP_MJ_CREATE    \Device\Harddisk0\DR0    SUCCESS    Desired Access: Generic Read/Write, Disposition: Open, Options: Synchronous IO Non-Alert, Non-Directory File, Attributes: n/a, ShareMode: Read, Write, AllocationSize: n/a, OpenResult: Opened    File System   
5:02:33.1525378 PM    eqgame.exe    69288    IRP_MJ_DEVICE_CONTROL    \Device\Harddisk0\DR0    FAST IO DISALLOWED    Control: SMART_GET_VERSION    File System   
5:02:33.1525444 PM    eqgame.exe    69288    IRP_MJ_DEVICE_CONTROL    \Device\Harddisk0\DR0    SUCCESS    Control: SMART_GET_VERSION    File System   
5:02:33.1527674 PM    eqgame.exe    69288    IRP_MJ_DEVICE_CONTROL    \Device\Harddisk0\DR0    FAST IO DISALLOWED    Control: SMART_RCV_DRIVE_DATA    File System   
5:02:33.1527730 PM    eqgame.exe    69288    IRP_MJ_DEVICE_CONTROL    \Device\Harddisk0\DR0    SUCCESS    Control: SMART_RCV_DRIVE_DATA    File System   
5:02:33.1529813 PM    eqgame.exe    69288    IRP_MJ_CLEANUP    \Device\Harddisk0\DR0    SUCCESS        File System   
5:02:33.1529895 PM    eqgame.exe    69288    IRP_MJ_CLOSE    \Device\Harddisk0\DR0    SUCCESS        File System   
5:02:33.1552164 PM    eqgame.exe    69288    IRP_MJ_CREATE    \Device\Harddisk1\DR1    SUCCESS    Desired Access: Generic Read/Write, Disposition: Open, Options: Synchronous IO Non-Alert, Non-Directory File, Attributes: n/a, ShareMode: Read, Write, AllocationSize: n/a, OpenResult: Opened    File System   
5:02:33.1552386 PM    eqgame.exe    69288    IRP_MJ_DEVICE_CONTROL    \Device\Harddisk1\DR1    FAST IO DISALLOWED    Control: SMART_GET_VERSION    File System   
5:02:33.1552452 PM    eqgame.exe    69288    IRP_MJ_DEVICE_CONTROL    \Device\Harddisk1\DR1    NOT SUPPORTED    Control: SMART_GET_VERSION    File System   
5:02:33.1552574 PM    eqgame.exe    69288    IRP_MJ_CLEANUP    \Device\Harddisk1\DR1    SUCCESS        File System   
5:02:33.1552659 PM    eqgame.exe    69288    IRP_MJ_CLOSE    \Device\Harddisk1\DR1    SUCCESS        File System   
5:02:33.1572442 PM    eqgame.exe    69288    IRP_MJ_CREATE    \Device\Harddisk2\DR2    SUCCESS    Desired Access: Generic Read/Write, Disposition: Open, Options: Synchronous IO Non-Alert, Non-Directory File, Attributes: n/a, ShareMode: Read, Write, AllocationSize: n/a, OpenResult: Opened    File System   
5:02:33.1572687 PM    eqgame.exe    69288    IRP_MJ_DEVICE_CONTROL    \Device\Harddisk2\DR2    FAST IO DISALLOWED    Control: SMART_GET_VERSION    File System   
5:02:33.1572752 PM    eqgame.exe    69288    IRP_MJ_DEVICE_CONTROL    \Device\Harddisk2\DR2    NOT SUPPORTED    Control: SMART_GET_VERSION    File System   
5:02:33.1572866 PM    eqgame.exe    69288    IRP_MJ_CLEANUP    \Device\Harddisk2\DR2    SUCCESS        File System   
5:02:33.1572946 PM    eqgame.exe    69288    IRP_MJ_CLOSE    \Device\Harddisk2\DR2    SUCCESS        File System    

I posted this on the DGC issue tracker and found similar posts with other Daybreak games (like H1Z1 I believe) that also had the same problem - enumerate all drives each time you login or zone when run as admin.

https://windirstat.net/

Helped me , maybe it will help you ?