Windows 7: Constant hard drive activity?

Hi,

I installed Windows 7 RC. When ever I am booted into Windows 7 one of my hard drives (probably not system drive - sounds like my secondary storage drive) is constantly working. Not very much but still making sounds.

I have completely turned off indexation, there is no automatic defrag going on. I have set a constant size to the paging file and there is no antivirus activity going on. The hard drive is making noise even when the system is idle for a long time and also when I am using it.

The processes tab in the task monitor shows no process that is using CPU.



What can this hard drive activity be?

Thanks!

Windows Search service perhaps?

I get this same problem sometimes as well.

When I had this question recently I installed SysInternals (a group of talented MS programmers) free Process Monitor to see the disk access and responsible processes in real-time. Perhaps this might be of help in your case:

SysInternals Process Monitor

I have disabled WSearch as well so it is not Windows search.
I will try SysInternals Process Monitor.

Ill be interested in what you find to be the cause of this. I too have the same issue. I always have my PC on and overnight when im not using it, it seems to go busy, sometimes just for a few moments, other times all night. Odd thing is though is when i start doing something it noise stops...

Others have posted about this only to conclude that it is a mystery and the only solution is a solid-state drive. So let us know if you solve it.

That is bizarre. In those threads did the others admit that the problem went away when a SSD was installed in place of the disk-based HD or just that it wasn't noticeable?

Assuming the activity were caused by an OS process and not by virtue of the device type I would be even more eager to search for the cause if I had an SSD installed. Aren't SSD lifespans limited by a finite number of read/write cycles or is that just rumor?

The conclusion was that it does not go away, so your only choice is to silence it by removing the moving parts which make noise.

System idle process on XP was silent... could it be that its that just being noisy?

(yes im picking at straws, but it may jolt some good ideas)