Was wondering if anyone has ever had a DVD-ROM that spins full speed with Windows OS when the disc in the drive is not really being used?

Symptoms & What has been tried:

Computer boots and the boot order is set to check for bootable Disc before booting off HDD. It pauses for 1 or 2 seconds to see if the disc is bootable and moves on. Windows boots from HDD and the disc is still spinning full speed in the drive. For the full duration that the computer is used the drive is spinning the disc full speed even though its not being used by any applications.

The disc is a DVD-R which contains some old data to it in reference to a recent project that has me tapping into old info. I tried other discs and get the same result so its not the disc itself that is the trigger for this odd behavior.

The hard drive in this system is dual boot with Windows 7 64-bit home premium and Linux Mint 17.1.

When booting to Linux Mint 17.1, the DVD-ROM goes from the full speed to rest state of no spinning.

So, Windows 7 appears to be KEEPING the drive mounted and active spin when Linux does not, and so I don't believe this to be a hardware issue, but instead something in Windows 7 that is configured to keep the DVD-ROM active. Just not sure what is doing this...

Additionally I thought that maybe the drive itself is odd and so if I swap out this DVD-ROM with another DVD-ROM maybe the odd issue would clear up, so I swapped out the LG drive with a DVD Lite-On drive that I had, and the other drive also experiences the same oddity.

My thoughts were that maybe Windows 7 is trying to maintain an index of the drive and so its keeping it active even though nothing appears to be reading the disc because there is no blinking or solid lit LED activity. The LED remains out and not lit when spinning full speed at idle.

Last check was to take the same discs tested in this system with the oddity to a laptop also running Windows 7 64-bit and see if the OPTICAL drive spins non stop with the discs in that system. The laptop was at rest with no spinning of the disc when disc inserted and not in use by any applications.

Right now the only solution has been to remove the disc from the drive when not NEEDED to be in the drive, but its an annoyance that I cant just leave the disc in there for when I need it because I don't WANT the optical drive to burn out prematurely from excess motor use to drive motor for the disc spin. And sometimes when removing the disc that is important, I would accidentally misplace it and then have to scramble to try to locate it, whereas if it just remained in the drive it would be there vs elsewhere. I have been trying to force myself to a habit of placing the disc into a jewel case in 1 specific location of my desk so that I am not having to scramble for that disc when working on projects with its reference material. Sure I suppose I could copy the data from that disc to the HDD and put the disc back into safe keep, but this drive spin annoyance I figured I would try to correct if it can be corrected vs writing 4.7GB of data to HDD and then removing that 4.7GB reference material after the project is done etc making extra steps for myself.

Any suggestions on what to check and how to correct this greatly appreciated. Maybe there are others out there that just leave the optical drive to spin full speed and don't care about it since the system works without problems otherwise and with the disc already spun up, the disc data is that much quicker to be read by the system with system not having to wait for disc to come up to speed to be read.

Hardware:

Biostar MCP6PB M2+ Motherboard
Athlon 64 X2 4450B CPU running 2.3Ghz normal clock due to warmer room temps. (* I use to run this at 10% O.C, but due to summer temps, I set the FSB back to 200 from 220Mhz because the CPU was creeping up to 59C with overclock, whereas without overclock it caps off at 51C )
4GB DDR2 Corsair RAM
750GB SATA HDD
DVD-RW Drive IDE Master
ASUS ATI Radeon HD 5450 512MB Video Card in PCI Express 2.0 Slot