Hard drive activity in BIOS / before OS boot. Whats going on?

I've got a couple of WD Black hard drives in my system, they're just used as storage.

Noticed this morning that there was constant sounds of disk activity, check Windows 7 resource monitor. Says the drives have no activity, no files being written to, should be idle.

Activity LED is dark.

Shutdown, power off, restart enter the UEFI BIOS hard drive activity sounds can easily be heard. Power off restart, press F8 at Windows, boot option screen same thing.

So are the hard drive(s) doing something on their own? It doesn't sound like a bad sound, just disk activity like if you were moving many files around.

So are the hard drive(s) doing something on their own?

Click to expand...

If there are any CurrentPendingSectors (drive amnesia - these are sectors the drive wrote but can not read - lost data) the drive will try to recover them in the background.

Check this with CrystalDiskInfo.

at the time there wasn't any SMART info that looked out of place.

I just let it sit there at the bios screen and do it's thing for awhile. It kept on doing whatever making it's noises for about 30 mins and now everything is quiet and back to normal.

I don't know what it got up to, maybe some sort of self test?

Drives setup in a raid array ??

AaronGant said:

at the time there wasn't any SMART info that looked out of place.

I just let it sit there at the bios screen and do it's thing for awhile. It kept on doing whatever making it's noises for about 30 mins and now everything is quiet and back to normal.

I don't know what it got up to, maybe some sort of self test?

Click to expand...

Some BIOSes (Asus) have a SMART setting to initiate a self test at boot time. It may have kicked one off that was still running. the selftest is run by the drive's firmware and would not stop from a reboot.