Windows 7 Keeping Flash Drive Connected

[seekermeister]

I tend to keep some of my flash drives connected, simply because it is a convenient way to keep track of them. However a thought just crossed my mind, that since I have noticed that sometimes the activity light on my external SATA drives flash when they are not in use, perhaps that is because my AV is scanning them, but it happens too often for that to be the only reason.

I haven't seen the activity lights on the flash drives act that way, but it still makes me wonder if there is some kind of activity going on unnoticed? I'm thinking about the limited lifetime of those drives and how it might shorten their usefulness. Am I being overly worried, or is it a valid concern?

 

[Josephur]

You're probably worrying too much, but you can always use the Resource Monitor to monitor disk activity. If your drives support SMART (most do) then you can use this to monitor their health overtime and even predict most failures.

One such SMART monitoring programs is Disk Checkup by PassMark: http://www.passmark.com/products/diskcheckup.htm

 

[Jimbo22]

Does this activity happen all the time or just right after a reboot? It's my opinion that since you leave your flash drives plugged in, they in fact act like internal drives, thus the OS scans them when data is being called, being indexed, registering and so forth.