Lot of HD accessing?

Johnny Girth · 7 Feb 2007 at 09:43

Alright guys

How much accessing should there be of my HDs? I've got an E6600 with 2gb ram, fresh install of windows on a raid array of 2 x 250gb 7200.10 drives. It's split into 100gb and 365gb drives with windows on the 100gb one. I did actually fill up the 100gb one when transferring stuff across and now I've had to free it up by sending some across to the larger one.

After doing that it seems to access the HD all the time, even when just opening browsers etc.

Seems a bit excessive. Any thoughts?

rpstewart · 7 Feb 2007 at 09:56

The disks should be idle most of the time so it's worth tracking this down because it'll affect normal disk accesses.

There are a few things to check:

Is the indexing service turned on for any of the drives?
What is your AV program scheduled to do?
Have you checked for spyware?
Take a look in Task Manager, what's the size of the commit charge? With no apps running it should be 3-400Mb tops
On the processes tab turn on the VM size column from the view menu and see if anything is using an excessive amount of swap space.

Johnny Girth · 7 Feb 2007 at 10:20

Thanks for the reply. Commit Charge is 297mb total, 4gb limit, 765mb peak.

PF Usage is 290mb.

The accessing isn't that great but like when I've closed everything down and then open a firefox window it definitely accesses the HD and it takes a bit longer to load than I think it should.

How do I check indexing? Should this be off?

WoZZeR · 7 Feb 2007 at 10:27

To switch off indexing just right click on the drive in 'my computer' and select properties and clear the lower check box.

Johnny Girth · 7 Feb 2007 at 10:34

It's switched on - is it a lot better to be off?

Also should the HDs be accessed when windows has booted up (and settled down) and say Firefox is opened? Seems like a lot of work for a simple task!

Cheers

rpstewart · 7 Feb 2007 at 10:34

You're always going to get disk access when you start up a new program. Do you feel it's slow based on a gut feel or is it slower than you're used to?

Have you run HDTach to confirm that the drives are running at a decent speed?

Johnny Girth · 7 Feb 2007 at 13:36

Not sure really, maybe I just didn't expect there to be any HD accessing at all. But when I'm browsing and open a new page you can hear it click a little bit just for a fraction of a second but it does it every time. Does it need to?

Doesn't bother me I guess. HD tach looks ok - will post a screeny later.

Starts off around 160mb/s and drops to about half that at 500gb. Average 130mb/s 13.2ms access time.

rpstewart · 7 Feb 2007 at 14:24

Disk sounds fine then.

You can't fully eradicate disk access even in Firefox as it'll be going and reading/writing to its cache.

To be honest I'm not sure that your experiencing anything unusual. The other thing to remember is that with RAID all the disks in the array will be going simultaneously so it will be a bit more obvious than with a single disk.