Hard disk strangely active most of the time

DamanC · 18 Nov 2007 at 15:11

Funny one this, my HDD seems to constantly be active for no reason :confused:

My setup consists of;

Gigabyte P35C-DS3R
WD 500GB drive with a 250GB partion with XP on (WDC5000AAKS-00YGA)
4GB OCZ Ram
E6750 @ 3.6GHz

Latest chipset drivers from GB website installed. This is a week old build, and seems to have got worse from day one.

I Ran HD Tune last night, average transfer rate is 57.5

when the disk was active the average was probably half that!

Disk mon is showing data constantly being written to the drive. My page file is system managed.

Any ideas? Is there anything out there that will tell me excatly what my drive is writing?

Cheers

rpstewart · 18 Nov 2007 at 17:54

Have you got the indexing service turned on? Check the properties of the disk from My Computer, there's a check box on the General tab.

DamanC · 18 Nov 2007 at 21:20

I have yes, whats that when its at home?

rpstewart · 18 Nov 2007 at 22:43

Basically Windows creates an index of all the files on the disk to speed up searching. Unfortunately creating the index requires the system to scan all the files on the machine but I would have thought that it would be done by now, unless you've stuck a load of extra stuff onto the system.

EffBee · 19 Nov 2007 at 12:52

Yes, I was going to suggest the indexing service too.

As it happens I have just this moment installed a new DVD drive which came with Nero 7 essentials. This product also has an indexing service. You might like to take a close look at apps you have installed and see if any are doing anything in the background.

Also..
The WWW has loads of info about thing to turn on/turn off/optimize/tweak for security etc after a vanilla OS install. If you worry about security there are things like guest account, shares, remote management services and so on to manage.

DamanC · 19 Nov 2007 at 19:03

Thanks for the pointers guys, indexing service swiched off

to no avail

Strangely enough I have Nero 7 installed on my machine, how can you tell if nero is indexing and importantly, how to turn it off?

What is the best way to see what other apps are up to?

sammie377 · 19 Nov 2007 at 23:05

Open task manager and see what process is using it, you can shut down 1 at a time until it shows itself, make a note of what you close because some system files will reboot the PC then you can put a tick not to close that app.