My C drive has been a whiner from day one and masks even the fan noise from the computer. So I am wondering if the much quieter D HDD on the same IDE channel spins all the time or just when paged. I use it for backup and archiving so it isn't called on a lot. They are on cable select and I am running XP (no RAID).
Thanks

   All of the time.
   There is a setting in Power Options in the Control Panel called "Turn off hard disks" which you can set to turn a drive off after a certain amount of time of non-use.  
   Hibernate and Standby also shut down the harddrives.

I used Turn off hard discs on Win 98 when running one HDD. XP pages my C drive every few seconds though and will never let it time out. Thanks for refreshing my memory on using this option again.