Steam doesn't let my hard drive sleep.

[EternalGaia]

I have my hard drive (D drive) configured to stop spinning 10 minutes after it goes idle since i spend lot's of time away from the computer.
I noticed that sometimes i can go an hour without using it and it never goes to sleep. Sometimes it goes to sleep and 1 minute later it starts spinning again. I use an AV so i thought that was the problem but Resource Monitor shows that it's steam that's accessing it regularly as you can see in the image: https://i.imgur.com/gxXTcgz.png
This disk only has steam games and virtualbox images.
If i shut down steam, the hard drive goes to sleep as it should and it stays like that.
The spin-up process puts strain on a hard drive, maybe more than just leting it spin all the time.
Is there a technical reason why steam needs to constantly read/write from the drive if it's not being used?

[Sasori Kigaru]

Steam keeps things up to date and this includes Workshop mods/addons. Thus if any addon, mod or game is out of date then steam will wake up the harddrive and get to work as its supposed to.

Steam can't do this if it is shut down, and games can cease being updated if you go to each game and its properties, within the update section where you can choose to only update the game at launch.

Alternatively, you can go into steam general settings and set a time during the day for steam to do its updates though that is a feature I have not used myself.

TLDR: The drive IS being used as games/mods/workshop addons are being updated.

[↑↑↓↓←→←→BASelect]

I have 12 hdds/sdds and i use a monitoring program and i never see any activity on them from steam. And i have a steam folder on 6 out of my 12 drives. And none of the 6 has disk activity according to my sensor panel.

[EternalGaia]

@Sasori Kigaru i'm well aware of all that. I have steam configured to only update games within a specific time.
I don't think it's updating workshop mods because it accesses the disk like 2 times on a 15 minutes window, ALL THE TIME.
I used this app to see that apps the steam process was acessing. I let it open for 15 minutes while steam is just hidden in the windows tray : https://i.imgur.com/2VWAixV.png
Those 2 write counts on the D drive didn't happen at the same time but like 5-7 minute apart and they would keep growing with time.

[Elucidator]

that might be a bug. hm....
Steam logs what it is doing, maybe you can find out if you check the logs
and if it doesn't contain anything useful, you may need to run steam in dev mode and open the console and such

https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Command_Line_Options#Steam_.28Windows.29

Edit: If it is a bug, you can make a report here: https://steamcommunity.com/groups/SteamClientBeta/discussions/0/

[Sasori Kigaru]

Originally posted by EternalGaia:

@Sasori Kigaru i'm well aware of all that. I have steam configured to only update games within a specific time.
I don't think it's updating workshop mods because it accesses the disk like 2 times on a 15 minutes window, ALL THE TIME.
I used this app to see that apps the steam process was acessing. I let it open for 15 minutes while steam is just hidden in the windows tray : https://i.imgur.com/2VWAixV.png
Those 2 write counts on the D drive didn't happen at the same time but like 5-7 minute apart and they would keep growing with time.

Gotcha, I don't use that software and when checking Resource manager I saw other processes such as Steamwebhelper that starts every now and again as shown here. https://i.gyazo.com/d2dfa95104cac8e0f3b51c8c26c1c06b.png

My thoughts on this is that EITHER there is another steam process your software isn't catching for some reason (I'd suggest checking with Resource manager too since its native with windows and it wouldn't hurt to look) OR there is a bug/memory leak that steam will need to fix.

Edit: If a bug then definitely report it with the links Elucidator provided above

[EternalGaia]

I started using resource monitor but it's harder to track down the problems because the activity doesn't stay on screen forever. That other tool keeps all accesses on screen and adds them up.
Also, those steamwebhelper processes are child processes from steam: https://i.imgur.com/HkBes8O.png . Monitoring the main one will take into account the others in that app and also with sysinternals process explorer.

I opened a bug report. The logs show stuff like:

[2022-02-09 19:46:05] AppID 4000 scheduler update : Priority User Initiated, not played for 19012265 seconds, update disabled for 0 seconds
[2022-02-09 19:46:05] AppID 4000 state changed : Fully Installed,Update Queued,
[2022-02-09 19:46:05] AppID 4000 state changed : Fully Installed,Update Queued,Update Running,
[2022-02-09 19:46:05] AppID 4000 update changed : Running,
[2022-02-09 19:46:05] AppID 4000 update changed : Running,Reconfiguring,
[2022-02-09 19:46:05] AppID 4000 update changed : Running,
[2022-02-09 19:46:05] AppID 4000 update started : download 0/0, store 0/0, reuse 0/0, delta 0/0, stage 0/0 
[2022-02-09 19:46:05] AppID 4000 has no changes, 2 active: 4000 (7787937819654684778),4000 (1790156912314818178), 2 target: 4000 (7787937819654684778),4000 (1790156912314818178),
[2022-02-09 19:46:05] AppID 4000 update changed : Running,Staging,
[2022-02-09 19:46:05] AppID 4000 update changed : Running,
[2022-02-09 19:46:05] AppID 4000 update changed : Running,Committing,
[2022-02-09 19:46:05] AppID 4000 starting commit from "D:\Steam\steamapps\workshop/downloads/4000" to "D:\Steam\steamapps\workshop/content/4000" : 0 updated, 0 moved, 0 deleted files
[2022-02-09 19:46:05] AppID 4000 update changed : Running,
[2022-02-09 19:46:05] AppID 4000 update changed : None
[2022-02-09 19:46:05] AppID 4000 state changed : Fully Installed,Update Queued,
[2022-02-09 19:46:05] AppID 4000 state changed : Fully Installed,
[2022-02-09 19:46:05] AppID 4000 scheduler finished : removed from schedule (result No Error, state 0xc) 

All of my garry's mod workshop stuff isn't updated in years so i don't know what's going on. Maybe it's not a bug and it's working as it should.

[Sasori Kigaru]

Originally posted by EternalGaia:

I started using resource monitor but it's harder to track down the problems because the activity doesn't stay on screen forever. That other tool keeps all accesses on screen and adds them up.
Also, those steamwebhelper processes are child processes from steam: https://i.imgur.com/HkBes8O.png . Monitoring the main one will take into account the others in that app and also with sysinternals process explorer.

I opened a bug report. The logs show stuff like:

[2022-02-09 19:46:05] AppID 4000 scheduler update : Priority User Initiated, not played for 19012265 seconds, update disabled for 0 seconds
[2022-02-09 19:46:05] AppID 4000 state changed : Fully Installed,Update Queued,
[2022-02-09 19:46:05] AppID 4000 state changed : Fully Installed,Update Queued,Update Running,
[2022-02-09 19:46:05] AppID 4000 update changed : Running,
[2022-02-09 19:46:05] AppID 4000 update changed : Running,Reconfiguring,
[2022-02-09 19:46:05] AppID 4000 update changed : Running,
[2022-02-09 19:46:05] AppID 4000 update started : download 0/0, store 0/0, reuse 0/0, delta 0/0, stage 0/0 
[2022-02-09 19:46:05] AppID 4000 has no changes, 2 active: 4000 (7787937819654684778),4000 (1790156912314818178), 2 target: 4000 (7787937819654684778),4000 (1790156912314818178),
[2022-02-09 19:46:05] AppID 4000 update changed : Running,Staging,
[2022-02-09 19:46:05] AppID 4000 update changed : Running,
[2022-02-09 19:46:05] AppID 4000 update changed : Running,Committing,
[2022-02-09 19:46:05] AppID 4000 starting commit from "D:\Steam\steamapps\workshop/downloads/4000" to "D:\Steam\steamapps\workshop/content/4000" : 0 updated, 0 moved, 0 deleted files
[2022-02-09 19:46:05] AppID 4000 update changed : Running,
[2022-02-09 19:46:05] AppID 4000 update changed : None
[2022-02-09 19:46:05] AppID 4000 state changed : Fully Installed,Update Queued,
[2022-02-09 19:46:05] AppID 4000 state changed : Fully Installed,
[2022-02-09 19:46:05] AppID 4000 scheduler finished : removed from schedule (result No Error, state 0xc) 

All of my garry's mod workshop stuff isn't updated in years so i don't know what's going on. Maybe it's not a bug and it's working as it should.

Judging from the logs it looks as if its trying to update the workshop content. To test and see if this is the issue you should unsub from your garry'smod workshop mods.

So go to the gmod workshop, look at your subscribed items and hit the "Unsubscribe from all" button. You could also add all your workshop addons into a collection if you want to easily sub to them all again but that can be a bit time consuming depending on how many you have. That said, if you haven't touched the game in years and don't particularly care? Then I wouldn't worry about it. Personally, I just want to see if this solves your issue.

[EternalGaia]

I don't think it's trying to update them. Or maybe the way it works is that it periodically checks for changes and accesses the disk doing that. IMO that information should be kept in ram. It completely breaks the power saving features that both windows and disks provide.
But sure enough, unsubbing the mods solves it. I then installed a mod for terraria and it started doing it again but with the terraria ID.
When i said the mods were old i meant that they were uploaded a long time ago and it's been a while since they received an update. I still use them.

Yesterday i opened a new issue on : https://steamcommunity.com/groups/SteamClientBeta/discussions/0/
I followed their rules for posting a new report. I came back an hour later to see if i had replies and couldn't find the thread anywhere. Don't know if it was deleted or never approved in the first place.