DVD ROM Keeps Spining at random times, especially when starting windows explorer

Some likely causes:

Drives set to sleep

In the power settings for Windows, choose the option to not put hard drives to sleep. That has been reported to also effect the optical drives as well.

Anti-virus set to scan on certain events

Your A/V program might be set to perform scans on all drives, including the optical drive. Tinker with those settings and see if that's the culprit. Then determine if you want to continue to have the A/V program scan optical drives. You might want to put up with the random spinning if A/V is doing it.

It might also be set to perform some kind of pre-scan on any drive that is accessed. If a program needs to discover all filesystems connected to the PC, perhaps the A/V program is doing an activity scan of some kind.

Firmware update needed

Check the manufacturer website for your optical drive. It may be that there is an updated firmware for the device that will take care of this behavior.

It sounds like whenever it spins up, it is due to an action that you're performing. For example, if you go to My Computer and wanted to see what drives you had listed, the DVD drive would spin up. It does this for a few reasons. If it case a custom icon then it will need to spin up to display it as it has to read from the disc. Also, if you did happen to want to explore the contents of the Dvd drive then it would have to spin up. Windows is probably spinning up the drive in advance invade you do go to that drive. It is similar to hard drives that have a spindown mode. Usually it will take a few seconds in order to spin up the hdd to access your info. Same concept, but the rotation of the dvd drive is louder and more noticeable.

I had the same behavior on my desktop computer. It was produced with the upgrade from Win 7 to Win 10. Thereafter, DVD ROM began to spin at random times. I disassembled my computer and move the SATA cable to another free slot on the motherboard. Symptoms disappeared. Perhaps someone this way will help.

For me, running Win10 64-bit (ver 1607), I tracked it down to a scheduled task which runs periodically and launches the Power Efficiency Diagnostics System Analyzer.

If you think this may be the cause, you can quickly check it's the same sound by running powercfg.exe -energy from an elevated command prompt. After 60 seconds you will hear an audible "click" from the CD- / DVD-ROM drive.

Further checking Task Scheduler for the AnalyzeSystem task under \Microsoft\Windows\Power Efficiency Diagnostics would reveal in the History tab whether the task fired off at the time the click was heard, remembering to allow for the 60s run-time.

Unfortunately the task does not readily lend itself to having its' configuration altered so that it fires less frequently or at more convenient times, but it is possible to disable it, which is what I have chosen to do.

An alternative approach would be to disable the stock MS task and create your own Task with all the parameters you desire.

The usual MSDN searches will provide information on the Analyzer and whether you need or want to have it running on you system.

Hope this helps....