Hi -I have a Dell Inspiron laptop running Windows 7 Home Premium x64. Whenever there is a disk in the CD/DVD drive, the drive will spin up every minute, for about 25-30 seconds. Using Process Explorer, I have found that each time this occurs, the program vsdldr.exe (Virtual Disk Service Loader) starts/stops. In addition to this being very annoying, it seems like it would be 1) an energy drain; 2) adding more wear and tear to the drive.My questions -1. Why does this happen?2. Is there any way (short of disabling the Virtual Disk Service) to stop this?3. Are there any ramifications to disabling the Virtual Disk Service?I have a feeling this is not neccesarily a VDS problem, rather some other program may be waking it up once a minute. The ideal goal would be to identifiy that piece of software, and either disable that, or tell it not to involve the CD drive.Ideas?Thanks, Mike

Just a quick followup.After I posted, I got to thinking, perhaps I could use Process Monitor to dig a bit deeper. So, I ran Procmon and captured the startup of vdsldr.exe. I found that it was started from svchost.exe which had three services defined: DCOM launcher, Plug and Play, Power.Looking at the stack for some of the events that dealt with starting vdsldr.exe, I found that they were passing thorugh rpcss.dll, so it must have been DCOM launch. I looked in the log prior to the svchost entries, and I found some entries for "Dell Data Safe Local Backup". Hmmm. I then tried to see if there were configuration parameters for this (indicating how often it wakes up, but could not find any). Since I don't make use of this, I uninstalled it, and the problem went away.Mike

Don't know why but this exact problem started happening to me today. I installed a new video card and also received some windows updates today, and at some point today my Dell Studio XPS started experiencing the exact same problem. The hard disk was spinning up every minute and I could see the Virtual Disk Service appearing in the process list at the same time every time the disk spun up. Removing the Dell Data Safe Local Backup (which I wasn't using anyway) made the problem go away. Thanks a lot MikeG24, you really saved the day!