Wasn't sure quite where to ask this question.  I seem to have another drive doing funny things.  I have 9 HDD's + 1 Parity drive.  The HDD in question is disk 1 (a 500gb SATA).

 

After starting the system, everything appears fine.  I start writing to disk 9, so it and the parity HDD show millions of read/writes.  The other HDD's show 37 reads, one 35 and one 88.  BUT disk 1 shows 1043 reads and hasn't spun down like the other drives. 

 

All disks (apart from 9 and parity which I'm writing to) so only 8 writes.   

 

What would cause disk 1 to be read when it is NOT being used? (XBMC interface is switched off, so nothing is accessing it).  This disk (HDD) is plugged into a MB port.

Until you know of something wrong, I would always go with the simplest explanation first, which is that the system is working fine, and you have something as yet unidentified periodically checking the drive.  From the recent poll, many users use their unRAID system for media storage, and many of the media-related programs out there do periodically check for changes in selected, monitored folders.  SageTV checks video and other media folders every 5 minutes.  Picasa watches photo folders, and many others do also.  On Windows systems, they can register themselves with the operating system for change notification, with very little system impact, but on networked and NAS drives, they have to rely on periodic reads of the directories.

 

Many scanners and printers install monitoring utilities into the system tray.

 

I can't think of any other reason.  Sysinternal's FileMon utility can be used (with appropriate filtering) to determine what program is accessing what file.  You'll need to determine which machine is the source of the reads.

 

The periodic checks will keep the drive from spinning down (as you know).

 

Until you know of something wrong, I would always go with the simplest explanation first, which is that the system is working fine, and you have something as yet unidentified periodically checking the drive.  From the recent poll, many users use their unRAID system for media storage, and many of the media-related programs out there do periodically check for changes in selected, monitored folders.  SageTV checks video and other media folders every 5 minutes.  Picasa watches photo folders, and many others do also.  On Windows systems, they can register themselves with the operating system for change notification, with very little system impact, but on networked and NAS drives, they have to rely on periodic reads of the directories.

 

Many scanners and printers install monitoring utilities into the system tray.

 

I can't think of any other reason.  Sysinternal's FileMon utility can be used (with appropriate filtering) to determine what program is accessing what file.  You'll need to determine which machine is the source of the reads.

 

The periodic checks will keep the drive from spinning down (as you know).

 

 

Thx for the reply.  I thought it was strange disk 1 had 1043 reads compared to only 37 for the other drives.  There is nothing connected to the unRAID except for the PC doing the writes currently.  Also, there is nothing on disk 1 except for media files (not currently being accessed).  Since the initial reads have taken place, no further reads have occured and the drive has since spun down.

 

This has occurred seemingly only in the last few days.  I guess all I can do is keep an eye on it.  Thankfully, the system is running fine, but this occurence did seem out of place. 

I think I've sussed this one.  A certain program that is used to backup DVD's is being opened and closed  often.  Because I have been writing across the network, it would seem the program tries to default to that location - and therefore reading disk 1 (which I haven't been writing to for a while surprisingly - but this fits)