Windows 7: Why does my hardrive run rhythmically and constantly?

I recently upgraded my Dell Latitude D620 to Windows 7 Professional. I am very happy with it, but a little concerned.

My hard drive runs constantly ever since I upgraded. It makes little data bursts at a frequency of around 2-3 bursts per second. The hard drive activity light is basically just blinking...all the time.

I have looked in the resource monitor and found nothing strange. The biggest disk user is System. When I open files or whatever, the disk runs as you would expect, more or less continuously. Then, it goes back to this rhythmic thing again. I am concerned for the life of my drive. Anyone else experience this?

Basically your system is just performing it's post install housekeeping, The drives are being indexed and the superfetch cache is being populated and organised.

This can take a while to complete dependent on the amount and the type of data involved and also as this is set to back-off whenever you actually use the machine.

If possible I would leave the machine switched on for a few hours when you are not using it to allow these processes to complete.

That seems like a valid explanation...but it's still going. I left my computer on all night and all day today, and it continues to do this. I feel like it's stuck in some kind of loop.

Windows 7 comes with an excellent resource monitor that should show you exactly what process is accessing the disk.

You can launch this either from the task manager or type Resource into the start search box.

Post back details of the usage if you need further help with identifying the cause

IPSecLog.exe is the biggest user under "Processes with Disk Activity" with around 14,000 bytes per second. System sometimes spikes into the 200,000+, but usually around 5,000

IPsecLog.exe also is the top user user "Disk Activity" normally, with around 10,000. Every once in a while System will pick up over 900,000 bytes per second.

The corresponding graphs are extremely varied. Huge spikes, pretty much always.

Hi and welcome

that is possibly the disk cache. How much ram do you have? When y ou run out of ram it writes data to HD. If you eant to see how large it is set to (cache) its in the system control panel

Let us know if you dont understand something

ken

I have just tried a search for this file on my system and it is not found. Web references to this file indicate that it may be a component of the Cisco VPN client.

If you are not running said client I would advise you do a full malware sweep as some links indicate that a file of this name may be a component of a malware infection.

It may be nothing but I think it is a good idea to check this before trying anything further

There is a little program that quietens down hard drives in notebooks, and which I used on an Asus EEE Netbook to stop the constant clicking which arises from the OS power management and/or HDD firmware battling against eachother trying to set the HDD into park/active mode.

Get it here:- Main (quietHDD)

It certainly hushed my drive down a significant amount

Barman, you were right. It was the Cisco VPN. I have it so I can connect to my university's network when I am off-campus, which makes it so I can access my network drive and programs that require a network license.

It's a junk program. And, apparently, not compatable with Windows 7. It used to work, and now when I try to connect, it doesn't work. I disabled it and the hard drive chirping stopped. Thank god. I'll have to talk to the network people here to see if they've got support for 7 yet.

Thanks a lot y'all. You are good people.

Hi,

I am having the exact same problem with disk activity but the solution to this tread won't work for me as I don't have a VPN client. The research I have done is leading me towards the page file as the problem after looking at the disk activity. But I am not sure as there seems to be quite a few processes creating high disk activity, including Firefox profile cache, $Logfile, and MpWppTracing.bin. I only have 1GB of RAM. Would I be better served to add RAM before doing anything else like using Cacheman? Forgive me if this isn't the proper way of requesting help.