New
#1
Constant Hard drive access
First post on here. Hi everyone!
I was wondering if any of you might be able to help identify a problem I'm having. A couple of weeks ago I upgraded my graphics card and PSU and noticed hard drive activity when my PC was idle. About three little clicks every 2-5 seconds (The hard drive light doesn't always come on). There isn't any effect on Performance. CPU usage is usually at 0% like normal. When I boot up it goes abit crazy with disc access, but it settles down after abit. Programs are maybe a little slow to start, but it's just so borderline I just don't know.
I wondered if it was because of downloading a new driver for my graphics card, so I tried system restore, but it still did it. I've also scanned for viruses with Avast and security essentials but nothing has come up. I don't use this machine for web browsing really, and havent downloaded any mods recently or visited any spurious webpages. Maybe I should mention I uninstalled some antivirus software I had called webroot not long before. I've heard that some antivirus sabotages your computer when you uninstall it?
I read on the net that the clicking noise might be the "click of death" so I downloaded SeaTools and HD Tune and it passed tests from both of them except one on HD Tune - CRC Interface errors. It suggested that it was a faulty cable but I didn't touch the hard drive other than to connect the power cable to it, which wasn't anywhere near the drive itself. After a bit of research I read that it might be indicative of windows becoming corrupt. Is that correct?
I've done a couple of other things aswell. I had a look in Process Explorer for what might be accessing the disc so much. (read a tutorial that you should look for I/O reads and read bytes) and saw two culprits - steam and explorer.exe. Closed both of them, still no joy. What else? Hmmm... Oh yeah, I've scanned for errors with HD Tune and it didn't show any damaged sectors. Also run Check Disc aswell. And I've defragged the drive. Tried CCleaner aswell. And, just out of curiosity I tried disabling Indexing and Superfetch*. That didn't work either.
Help!
(As you can probably gather I'm not the most technically minded person. I've just been bumbling along with what I've read on the net. I'll my best to follow up on anything you suggest.)
*Read that sometimes it's responsible for thrashing the HD when idle.
Last edited by The Velour Fog; 16 Jun 2013 at 07:50.