Constantly churning HDD ?

DanB

DanB

DanB

Associate
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
347
Location
Cambridge
My PC sucks... I have an Asus A8N SLI, 3800 x2, 2gb memory and 7900gs with a Seagate 7200.10 sataII 250gb.

My problem is performance is really quite poor. The machine locks up frequently, and often gets into pausing for five or ten seconds before carrying on again. The wierdest symptom seems to be that the hard disc is CONSTANTLY churning - often as if I am defragging. I have system restore turned off, and watching in the task manager it really does seem that the system is totally idle - 99% idle in the CPU, and only 400-odd out of 2000mb memory in use. However, the disc light is still flashing, and the drive is still churning.

I don't have any kind of searching software, and almost nothing in the task bar - the only real program in there is Mcafee Virusscan enterprise.

Does anyone have any suggestions? If you aren't running a program, or touching the mouse, or anthing, why should the disc be working at all?! Is there a way I can find out what task threads are using the drive?
 
DanB said:
My PC sucks... I have an Asus A8N SLI, 3800 x2, 2gb memory and 7900gs with a Seagate 7200.10 sataII 250gb.

My problem is performance is really quite poor. The machine locks up frequently, and often gets into pausing for five or ten seconds before carrying on again. The wierdest symptom seems to be that the hard disc is CONSTANTLY churning - often as if I am defragging. I have system restore turned off, and watching in the task manager it really does seem that the system is totally idle - 99% idle in the CPU, and only 400-odd out of 2000mb memory in use. However, the disc light is still flashing, and the drive is still churning.

I don't have any kind of searching software, and almost nothing in the task bar - the only real program in there is Mcafee Virusscan enterprise.

Does anyone have any suggestions? If you aren't running a program, or touching the mouse, or anthing, why should the disc be working at all?! Is there a way I can find out what task threads are using the drive?
Click to expand...

One suggestion is to take another harddrive, put a new install of Windows on that and see if it does the same. Your system is of good specification and shouldn't be suffering from poor performance.
 
Make sure the hard-disk isnt in compatability mode and try turning indexing off?
 
I actually spotted indexing last night, and have turned it off now - will see how that goes before attempting a substitution. Thanks for the suggestions, and I'll report back :D
 
defrag the bugger, do a disk check too

kbc said:
One suggestion is to take another harddrive, put a new install of Windows on that and see if it does the same. Your system is of good specification and shouldn't be suffering from poor performance.
Click to expand...
bleach fan?
 
hi :) just wondering have you sorted out your swap file accordingly??? This can effect the constant access to hard drives if it isnt set right...

So it should be set (both min and max) to your memory x 1.5 so this would be for you:

2048 (2 gigs) x 1.5

Min: 3072
Max: 3072

Ideally this would work even better on a partitioned drive, or even better the swapfile should be on another hard drive if you have a spare one, etc.

If not, not to worry, just set the swap file like this and it should help :D
 
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