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?

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.

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.

dotmaster206 said:

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?

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

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.

Barman58 said:

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 :)

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.