I have a 24/7 always-on Debian Jessie based headless home server that has a large 1TB SSD for the OS and all of my frequently accessed files. This same system has 4 larger hard disk drives in a SnapRAID array. These are mainly for archiving infrequently accessed Blu-rays and want those drives to remain spun down in standby unless I actually read or write to them. They are all formatted as ext4 and mounted with noatime and nodiratime enabled.
So even though no process or program should be regularly accessing those drives in any direct way, the hard drives constantly get spun up from standby. It seems to be related to graphical programs that provide a gui file browser, even something like Chromium. If I don't even browse into those drives, I'm thinking that these processes by simply getting a list of available drives spins up the hard disks. Much like blkid does. The problem is, it's hard to determine the root cause of this since none of these processes are actually reading or writing the filesystem on those drives, so no files are actually changing or being touched. Is there some sort of cache that I can populate or a buffer to prevent these programs from spinning up the hard drive simply by getting a list of available disks? This is honestly driving me insane, since I can't find a reliably way to keep these disks spun-down even though there is no direct access of the filesystem.
UPDATE: Thanks to Stephen's answer, I was able to trace the disk activity to gvfs and udisks. It's a real shame that these processes insist on waking up disks in standby when they aren't actually being accessed to do any real I/O with the filesystem. So far I just uninstalled them, knowing that it will remove some functionality from PCManFM and the like.
smartctl
queries to check the temperature or check the idle state. yes, this is stupid. blame the stupid firmware in most drives. Note that constantly spinning a drive down and up and up again can wear it out, as most drives have a limited number of times they can be 'parked'. safer to just disable idle spindown entirely. e.g. see unix.stackexchange.com/questions/44103/… – cas Apr 4 '16 at 8:31