the little used drive spent most of its time spooled down
Well, there may be exceptions to the rule.... on laptops for example, the manufacturers frequently ship special drivers that will spool down the drives because that's the single biggest battery life killer.
But on desktops, pretty much from the moment DC power hits the drive, to the moment it is removed, the thing never stops spining.
Whether or not I/O happens depends on a multitude of things ..... for example are you running both drives in a RAID one setup ... in which case the controller would definitley be busy chattering to keep things in sync.
Windows is also quite a noisy OS in terms of I/O ..... pleanty of background processes to keep your PC busy..... ;-)
Now I need an annunciation light even more.
Heh ... obviously PC manufacture is not an attractive career path for avionics engineers.... shame though..... no doubt a lot of things could be learnt.....
