Simple question: I have an external disk that sometimes I can hear is ticking for a good 15-20-30 minutes straight, every 2-3 seconds, like some kind of software is on a timer to do some kind of read or write against the disk. The disk contains backup files that I manually copy over, nothing automated to explain it.

What would be a good place, this sites chat rooms or somewhere else, to get a discussion going with someone who might know what I should look at to figure out why? This is Windows 10.

Things I've tried:

* performance monitor, disk tab, does not mention the drive letter involved, at all
* unassigning the drive letter, if the disk is currently ticking like this then this does not change it
* running malwarebytes just to exclude the possibility of a virus, reports 0 ... everything
* sysinternals process monitor, filter on "begins with" drive letter, it reports "perfmon" regularly doing a "QueryFullSizeInformationVolume", but the timing is off. Granted, perfmon is not actually running by my choice, and a powershell `ps` does not list it, but again, nothing strange reported …