Hard Disk Grinding after Media Centre TV

Whenever I have finished running Media Centre to watch TV my hard drive continues to grind away and is pretty loud and annoying. This is on a Win7-64, with 4GB of RAM with plenty of free hard disk space, so it can't be running out of memory or hard disk space. The TV decoder is a Hauppauge WinTV HVR 900-H. I appreciate that it records the program being watched to hard drive cache but surely it should stop the grinding after Media Centre is closed?

It doesn't do the grinding thing prior to running Media Centre and it only stops the grinding after a reboot. It's quite annoying because it's pretty loud - any ideas please?

Hi Sean

First thing you should do is backup whatever you need on that drive to a removable media or an external drive.
Some of the guru's on this site will provide better explanations on the symptoms of your problem however it could be most likely that the mechanical hard disk drive is failing. You may need to replace the hard drive - if there is a spare HDD around, you could try swapping it to verify if it is indeed the current HDD that's failing.

Have a look at this link for more information

Regards

Lomai said:

Hi Sean

First thing you should do is backup whatever you need on that drive to a removable media or an external drive.
Some of the guru's on this site will provide better explanations on the symptoms of your problem however it could be most likely that the mechanical hard disk drive is failing. You may need to replace the hard drive - if there is a spare HDD around, you could try swapping it to verify if it is indeed the current HDD that's failing.

Have a look at this link for more information

Regards

Thanks for the reply. I don't think the hard drive is failing TBH - at least I hope note but I do back up my stuff once a week externally anyway just in case.

When I say grinding it's a bit of an exageration more like it's behaving as though it is continueing to access files, indexing, cacheing stuff or something like this. But it just seems to go on and on.

Could try swapping with another HDD, if available, just so we can isolate if it's either the HDD or a result of software activity? From my very limited experience, software does not cause this sort of behavior.

Keep us posted

Regards

Lomai said:

Could try swapping with another HDD, if available, just so we can isolate if it's either the HDD or a result of software activity? From my very limited experience, software does not cause this sort of behavior.

Keep us posted

Regards

Hmmn I don't have a spare HDD to swap out. Is there any software you know of I could run that would check the integrity of the drive?

There's a lot of free diagnostics tools available on the net - first recommendation is to utilize those specifically made by your HDD manufacturer e.g. Seagate Sea Tools for Seagate drives etc.
Windows Check-disk can also be used - right click the HDD>Properties>Tools

Have a look at this blog

Regards :)

Install Process Monitor to see which files are actually accessed on disk, that will probably tell you what program is causing the I/O Process Monitor

Download the HD Tune trial software and run - it will show you if you have errors on your hard drive or any reason to be concerned about your hard drive.

HD Tune website

Well I just got around to solving this and thankfully it didn't turn out to be a problem with either the HDD or Media Centre . But some of the suggestions here lead to me figuring out what it was.

Well...rather oddly it turned out to be a dust laden fan on one of the graphics cards that was making all the noise and not the HDD after all. It sounded distinctly like the HDD constanly accessing files except it wasn't...

I guess it was happening after media centre since MC was making the cards run hotter and so more fan revs and more noise.

Anyway a quick clean and swapping of the two graphics cards around and I have a near silent PC again. Thanks for all the tips.