What is writing to my hard drive?

PMKeates · 3 Dec 2011 at 09:27

Hi guys

I have a weird issue that started yesterday. It seems that 'something' is writing/reading small amounts of data to my hard drive regularly i.e. with a continuous pulse. It's like I have a 1 second silence, short bzz for HDD, 1 second silence ad infinitum.

Now my primary OS drive and all apps sit on an SSD, so this isn't making the noise; it's my secondary data drive!

Any idea what software I can use to see what specifically is writing to a specific drive? Most of the software I know to use in these instances is just a general "x is being written" type thing and don't specify to where.

Thanks in advance!

KIA · 3 Dec 2011 at 12:04

Process Monitor might help.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896645

lurkio · 3 Dec 2011 at 12:05

if it is a regular thing happens every 2 secs for example
it is most likely the pagefile being written / read from

If you want to find out what exactly is doing it then get
procmon

menu bar at top has buttons for watch files / watch registry / watch network , just untick all but files , clear window then watch what comes up

theheyes · 3 Dec 2011 at 12:29

If you have any windows updates pending, install them. A similar thing happened to me the other week and I couldn't understand what was waking up my data drive.