It seems to me I've always had this issue - often I get hesitation in the operating system when I go to do something just because Windows forgot what's in the drive and has to spin it up to find out. It happens when you'd expect, like opening My Computer...but I just changed tracks in the Zune player and there was a noticeable delay before the next track started - during which time I heard the DVD drive spin up. I had the same thing happen earlier when I opened a new tab in Chrome - rather than my 'top 8' pages showing up, it was blank. Gotta spin up the drive to use a web browser, apparently.

WTF...I don't care what's in there, just do what you're supposed to do!

Is there a logical explanation for this, and maybe some way to make it stop?

I have no idea but mine does the same thing and it annoys the hell out of me. Sometimes I right click on a file to bring up the menu, and just the act of dragging the pointer over the "Send To" menu makes the PC freeze up for a second to figure out what's in the drives before it displays the "Send To" possibilities. Annoying when you're trying to work fast.

I'd be very interested in a way to stop.
Usually I avoid having discs at all times.

I usually don't have a disc in there (Steam FTMFW), but I've been playing Borderlands lately and I have the retail copy..so..yeah.

Yeah, I always crack my games so I don't have to switch discs all the time.
Might not work so well for Borderlands online though, does for LAN.

1. Waiting for drive to spin up
2. Scanning/reading the disk.

Both are stupid if you don't actually want it.

Yeah Tibby, we know that part -_-

The question is why the pc insists on spinning the drive in so many instances.

Are you sure its not your hard drive spinning up, and not the optical drive? Because mine only does that (except for My Computer where it would make sense, have to read the drive to tell you whats in it) when my hard drive powers down for power saving.

While I haven't had it check my disc drive when loading chrome, I have noticed it trying for several things.
Usually when asking where to install a game or program, or anything that opens an explorer type window.
Sometimes it's been for something that seems completely random, and it's definitely the disc drive, as it doesn't happen when theres no disc in it.

Yep, because I never have this issue with no disc in the drive (and my HD's aren't as loud as the DVD drives are).

Common sense would dictate that when the pc needs to check the drives that includes the cdrom. The folder selection menu doesn't know what you're using it for so it has to check everything including mounted, optical and removable drives.

Common sense should dictate that the whole system shouldn't freeze until it figures that out...or, it should remember that the drive hasn't been opened in four days and it's a pretty safe bet that the same disc is still inside!

I opened the Windows calculator and it froze while the disc spun up. Please tell me why the calculator needs to know what's in the drive.

Yes, I know that.
But it would be so much better if it only check the cdrom when you specifically clicked on it.

Also there are times when I'm doing something completely unrelated to exploring or whatever and I wonder why.

I won't go into technical details, but suffice to say that modern operating systems (and ancient IDE interfaces) are very complicated and this isn't a simple "Microsoft is lazy" matter.

Everything I have is SATA. I don't care if it pauses while I'm trying to pull up the drive (or my computer/etc), but calculator? Seriously?

Oh I believe you, I just wish it were better.

You sure it happened because of calculator, or something else in the background? Can you reproduce it?

If I wait a while, probably. It's done it twice with the calculator so far.

Bad programming. That is the single reason.

No, that is not an excuse. There's no reason Explorer couldn't display the items it knows while it waits for that disc to spin up, and remain responsive. In fact - doesn't it?

The way the OS currently treats it is as if the user can some how magically change a drive without opening and thus it checks every time it is referenced.

I think the logical way that it should work would be for the OS to only check when it detects that the drive has closed (it wouldn't need to check when it is opened) and then store the basic info in memory to hold until is needed. Then when it checks again after the next time the drive closes and see's that there's been a change, then it updates the info in memory as appropriate. This way the info is always on demand.

The exception to this is that it should check it whenever explore.exe is started (or restarted).

I'm not sure that drives are capable of telling the OS when they've had their disks ejected. After all, its those sorts of assumptions that led to those Win9x bluescreen errors where it would freak out if a disk was missing.

Since you can open a drive with a Windows command, it shouldn't be that hard for the drive to tell Windows when it's been opened. I'm no programmer..but really...

There are plenty of other issues. It's simpler and less error prone to just check on demand.

You can run Process Monitor to record an instance of the event, and then filter all events that access the drive and see wtf is going on, which process is accessing it, and what it is trying to do exactly. Might provide a clue as to the culprit.

Dunno I would love to hear a detailed answer for this too, I think it has something to do with how operating systems handle synchronous/asynchronous disk operations.

Maybe its similar to how in the Pre-XP Microsoft operating systems it was almost impossible to do any multitasking while formatting a floppy disk.

It was almost impossible to do any multi-tasking, period.

I remember reading something about that somewhere.

http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2009/01/02/9265754.aspx

Ah here it is, <3 Google.