Hard Drive Is Always Spinning

Lately my hard drive has been spinning virtually nonstop whenever my laptop is on. This includes when I'm using it, when I'm not using it, when it's in screensaver and power saver modes, basically any time it's turned on other than when it is closed.

I'm running Windows 10.0 build 10240 on an HP Envy. Trend Micro Maximum Security is installed and may be part of the issue, I'm not sure. Otherwise there is not that much installed on the machine and I've even uninstalled some of the pre-packaged programs and disabled others in the startup menu, but the issue persists.

So my question is twofold, 1 - is this a known issue with Win 10 and/or HP's and if so what is the fix; 2 - is it just something in my configuration or with my programs that I can solve?

Happy to provide more information or post screenshots of task manager, etc.

 

If you mean by 'spinning' you are hearing sounds from the laptop and or CPU usage is high, then various things to check:
Temperatures in the hardware. Have a look at the results from SPECCY
Check your system Start Ups - Task Manager > Start Ups
Autoruns is also very good to check more deeply.
Check that Windows Updates are up to date

 

Link to an Autoruns tutorial, be careful with it, it's a very powerful tool, it's probably best to report back with your other findings before using it.

 

Windows 10 has been at version 1511, build 10586 since November of last year. I don't know why yours isn't updated.

Microsoft is releasing an anniversary issue on August 2nd.

 

Yes, by "spinning" I mean that the hard drive is in use and the hard drive light on the side of the laptop is on. The fan is not necessarily on when this happens, the disk is just working even though the only programs I have open are Chrome and maybe Word. Speccy reports that temperatures on the hard disk, processor, graphics card, and motherboard all seem to be normal, between 34 and 39 degrees C.

I ran Autoruns but once it came back with dozens if not hundreds of items present in the various startup categories I didn't do anything further. I did update Windows to the latest version so we'll see if that makes a difference.

When I run Task Manager and go to the Processes tab, and sort by Disk, when the issue is present, the disk will be at 99% and it's usually System that is at the top taking most of the disk capacity. So I'm not sure what all that includes or what if anything could be changed.

 

Have a look at Start Ups that are flagged as 'enabled' in Task Manager > Start Ups. There may be more than needed. Post a screen shot of that focussed start up window (alt + PrtScr) if you need advice.