What Process / Svc keeps polling the DVD every 3 min???

anyone know this obscurity? Every 3 minutes, and "on demand" for certain manual operations, the OS is querying my DVD drive... in this case, the Samsung/TSST drive feels obligated to spin up, and when there's nothing to spin, it just clicks a bit then goes quiet.
other drives will light up their LED and/or click, but apparently many drives just respond via firmware and avoid any other power consumption or response.

There are many threads on this subject and apparently it is present on 8.0, 8.1, and versions of 7 at least. Many report the interval in the 2-3 minute range that I am seeing, though some clock it at 10 minutes. I have seen no answers to this.

putting a blank cd in the drive is the simplest way to avoid the annoyance of the clicking or lighting but being a tech, I'm embarrassed that I don't know how to curtail it. Since I know whether/not I need my Optical Drive, I don't need some phantom process checking it for me.

some are so agitated by this that every time they crank the laptop they disable the ODD.... that's just nasty.

all help appreciated.

and please.... it isn't a case of bad firmware, update firmware, reinstall drivers [there aren't any specific drivers, just generic], reinstall OS, etc. this is a normal windows process or service

 

I'd be interested to find out as well. My wild guess is that this may be a BIOS issue since not all machines do this. I don't have any Win 8 machines, but I do have a Gateway P7805u-FX running Win 7 Home Premium x64 that does this. None of my other ODD-equipped Win 7 computers (2 Thinkpads, 1 eMachines and 3 HP desktops), and none of my computers running older Windows (1 Compal FL92 and 1 HP 6910p on Vista, and 1 Thinkpad on XP) do this as far as I've noticed. If this was a Windows issue I would think all computers running Windows, or at least Win 7 and newer, would be affected.

 

My Gateway P7805u running Win 7 Home Premium x64 does NOT do that. Could it be some 3rd party software that doing it?

I seem to remember that TMT 5 used to do it and was phoning home, but I disabled that service and the problem went away.

Assuming your DVD drive is empty, try putting a DVD in there and see if it still polls.

 

yes, its interesting to read the many many posts on this subject.
my theory, so far unsubstantiable, is that all windows7/8 machines "query" or poll the devices, but how the device acknowledges or reports its state is different per device, per firmware. can't prove it. what makes searching the topic more difficult is that we've all heard of the "click of death", so the first naïve assumption people make is "my drive is dying". that's not the case here, and the regularity of interval tells me its a "normal" process that gets a sometimes annoying response. but like you, I've seen a LOT of systems over the past 5 years [I work on 'em] and have not seen this as an "issue" in them. that is, nobody contacted me and explained as a "problem" what we're discussing.

all of the 'routine' suspects, windowswise, have been tried: turn off search/indexing. turn off system restore. alter power settings.... etc etc etc. along with remove/reinstall device; uninstall device; upgrade/downgrade firmware; clean lenses; etc.
I have seen many vista systems display something similar to this except pings to the HDD, not so much ODD [again, unless the drive-specific response obfuscated]: you'll get regular small I/O fetches to the drive, like a slow heartbeat. again, hundreds or thousands of posts on the subject with not much in the way of a fix.

 

that's what I mentioned in paragraph 3 of the OP. put anything in the drive and you don't get the audibles [and I have read that on the drives that manifest the devil by flipping on the LED, that also stops with anything in the drive].
so that's the 'cure' for those less OCD than I