XPS 8960, how to stop hard drive from spinning up every 5-10 minutes?

Would have to be the HDD since SSDs have no moving parts, or maybe it's actually a fan or the liquid cooling pump...

Is something running in background that's accessing the HDD, like Windows Search and/or Windows Indexing, maybe an antiviral scan, etc? Try disabling them one at a time to see if that stops the noise.  Re-enable each one after testing it and then try the next one, so only one is disabled at a time.

I suspect that some background task could be causing the disk to be accessed? The Power setting probably is set 'low' to turn the drive off (hard drive, SSD's do not make a sound, it is the heads moving over the platters you are hearing and the drive spinning up as it turns on), and that task is causing the drive to turn on.

The suggestion to set the drive to NEVER turn off is good. However, a Laptop user it might not be, and one could question how much it adds to the wear and tear of the drive and its life, but it isn't something I'd worry about.

When you HEAR the noise or since you know the approximate time, you have some Windows Tools that can help identify the 'cause' possibly.

• Task Manager, open it up (right mouse button on the taskbar) and then on the top of the tasks where you see the percentages, clock on the Disk column until the highest user is on the top. That would more than likely be the task/program doing the drive access.
• Resource Monitor (Search for it or use the Control Panal --> Windows Tools to see the icon) will give you the same or better info. Especially on the Disk Access panel which can be sorted by file and look for anything that starts with your hard drive letter.

Between those 2 above you should be able the determine the 'why' the disk is accessed and if you can do anything to stop/decrease that, or just understand why?

Re:  one of the drives (not sure which) will fully spin up with a fairly loud noise, make a couple accesses (ie. I can hear normal hard drive noises), and then stop.

ssd does not make noise.  you can temporarily uninstall the hdd to confirm noise comes from that.  When confirmed opt to replace the hdd.  it is not technically faulty but certainly suboptimal for a new mechanical hdd.

@ispalten​ Thanks.  I've checked using Resource Monitor quite a few times and, as far as I can tell, there is no process that is causing the drive to be accessed.  When it spins up, there are no reads/writes to the drive that Resource Monitor observes.

As an aside, the PC in general is just extremely loud and I had another post about this as well.  I'm guessing it's because so much of the case is basically open and the HDD may not be fully enclosed (I need to check).  My old PC (also from Dell) had only a 2 TB SATA HDD and I could barely hear it.  This one is quite loud when doing drive accesses, which is surprising to me.

@RoHe​ Thanks!  I replied below but I checked using Resource Monitor and there is no process accessing the drive for reads/writes when the HDD spin-up happens.  Quite mysterious...

And you're sure it's not the liquid cooler pump, assuming you have liquid cooling, or some noisy fan? Liquid cooling pumps are reported to be noisy.  

By time you open Resource Monitor you may have already missed seeing whatever prrcess read/wrote to the HDD.

Easy enough to temporarily disable things like Windows Indexing Service, Windows Search, and background malware scans to see if you can pinpoint the culprit.

Or, boot in Safe Mode with networking, and see if you still hear the HDD spin up.  If it stops in Safe Mode, you can disable things on Startup tab in Task Manager one or a few at a time, and reboot normally to see if you can find the culprit that way.

@RoHe​ I don't have liquid cooling, just the air cooling.  I had kept Resource Monitor open so it was running the whole time and I never saw any accesses to D:\ when it was running, even during multiple times I heard the noise.  I can even hear it when the computer is otherwise quiet (ie. sleep/hibernate).  I'll try to open the case this weekend and verify it's actually the HDD and not some weird fan behavior.

I've had an XPS 8960 for about a year and finally got utterly sick and tired of all the excessive noise coming from this PC.  I'm not the only one based on a search of the issue.

Today I took the panel off and went for the first suspect- the factory spinning 2TB SATA HDD.  I disconnected the two cables running to it and powered the PC back on.  It's now been as quiet as a mouse both when powered on and while in sleep mode.  The fact that the noises occur in sleep mode tells me there is probably something going on outside of the OS, with the Dell firmware.  The disk was constantly spinning up and down and making noise in any power state other than power-off.  Ridiculous.