Main drive is SSD but I hear the HDD spinning constantly.

[Danyboy007]

I've got an HP Omen with an SSD as the main drive with the OS (SandDisk SD8SN8U) 128GB and an auxiliary HDD (HGST) 920GB. The system has recently started to slow down quite a lot and I can hear the HDD spinning whenever I run any task. I'm confused since I know the SSD has the OS on it and shouldn't produce any sound. I already disabled indexing to see if it fixed the problem but to no avail. I have all the drives on an optimization schedule and UEFI diagnostics don't show any errors. I have to constantly restart this Omen laptop for the speed to be tolerable. I must admit that I'm that guy who has like 50 tabs open in two different browsers but should this behavior make the system constantly access the HDD? I hardly keep anything on that drive other than a backup. HP replaced my motherboard about 6 months ago due to a screen/power/unknown issue and is now out of warranty. If anyone could kindly provide me with some input I would greatly appreciate your time.

[WAWood]

@Danyboy007 

You need to check your default downloading and saving locations -- as those might be writing to the HDD without your knowledge and that would keep it busy.

It's a constant speed device, so it's always going to be running and always going to be making some noise.  IF it's really troublesome, you should look into getting a SATA SSD, as that will have the same connections and fit right into the same place as the laptop HDD.

[Danyboy007]

Thank you so much for taking the time to respond and for the suggestion. I checked and both the browser and system download locations are either set to the c: drive or "ask" so I don't believe that's the issue unless some background app is constantly writing to the HDD instead of my main drive SSD. Let me clarify that it's not the noise that bothers me, it's the system lag while the read/write noise is going. I will add that the system lags even more after it has come back from sleep mode, it only runs at an acceptable speed on a fresh start. If I switch programs, say going from browsing on chrome, to MS Word then the system will take several seconds, sometimes up to 30-45 seconds to switch and during that time I will hear the HDD going. All my apps and software are installed to the c: drive SSD so that's why I'm confused about the read/write sound. What I really want to do is speed up my system and I thought that my system may not be running as efficient as possible or taking full advantage of my SSD if it is constantly accessing my HDD. Thanks again!

[WAWood]

@Danyboy007 

OK, understand.  One thing you could do is disconnect the HDD and see what operations fail as a result.  That will give you an idea of WHAT is using the HDD.

[Danyboy007]

Problem solved. It seems that the paging file size setting was making the HDD spin up constantly. I went to "performance options" then "virtual memory" and set the paging file size of the HDD to "none" and the main drive SSD c: to "managed by system". I have much better performance now and no spinning up of the HDD. Would you say this is an appropriate solution? Thanks for your previous suggestions.