Laptop Hard drive access

munge · 24 Apr 2008 at 12:34

Anyone know a way of finding out what program is accessing my laptop HDD? Short of stopping individual programs, is there a program that will show me what is actively using the drive?

Running Vista 32 on an XPS 1530. It's permanently clicking and if it's something that doesn't need to be on, I'd rather turn it off!

Cheers!

P.S. Tried using Task Manager and all I can see active are system processes, so would that mean it's just the swap file accessing it?

TheVoice · 24 Apr 2008 at 12:41

Open Task Manager, go to the Performance tab then click Resource Monitor. From there, expand the Disk section, and you can sort the Read and Write columns by clicking the column headings, which should at least show you what process is accessing the disk, and what file(s) it's accessing.

munge · 24 Apr 2008 at 18:28

Magic - will give it a go when I get home from work.

brendy · 24 Apr 2008 at 19:50

possibly the indexing service, it speeds up searches etc, if you open services.msc and either disable or stop it, either way you should notice a difference if it is indeed the culprit.

fish99 · 24 Apr 2008 at 20:52

If the laptop is new, as in a few days old, then yeah it could be indexing your drive. I suppose it could also be background downloading windows updates or something like that. As said above though, have a look at IO reads and writes in task manager, but remember some of the stuff in there is supposed to be doing continual IO operations and won't necessarily relate to hard disk activity.