Hard drive Constantly running

[Oskiee]

Greetings all. Ive been having an issue with my PC and im hoping for some help.

This is a computer i built, and its been marvelous. It has a Core2Quad 2.4ghz, 4gb 667mhz ram and a 500gb Hdd.

My problem has been that the hard drive wont stop read/writing. Even after its been left alone over night, and for hours on end, ill look at it and it'll still be active. Its also extremely sluggish, even after a clean install of W7, which i know is because of the hard drive.

Im wondering if i can get a second, third or fouth opinion... but im thinking that the HDD might be bad and its time for a new one. Ive tried reinstalling windows, and its still slow to load, and take for-freaking-ever to boot.

Thank you for any assistance.

 

[profdlp]

Run the tests from the hard drive manufacturer.

 

[Britton30]

If you recently upgraded your BIOS, that could cause constant HDD activity.

Type resmon into the Start/Search, enter, open the Disk Tab and you can see what the drive is doing.

 

[carwiz]

Are you ruining XP or Windows 7? What are you looking at to determine your drive is overly active? It's normal for Windows to write to the disk about every second or so. Right click the task bar then click Start Task Manager.
Click on the Performance tab then at the bottom click on Resource Monitor. At the top of Resource Monitor window, click the Disk tab. This will show what disk activity is occurring and the file names.

About in the center of the page, you should see something like this:

 

[carwiz]

Ops. Britton30 gave you quicker way to get to it. While I was still typing. Sorry.

 

[karlsnooks]

Oskiee,

Downlaod, install, and run the free CCleaner.

After cleaning with CCleaner, then carry out this procedure:

LIST OF STARTUP PROGRAMS USING CCLEANER


CCleaner | Tasks icon | Startup tab | click on Save to text file button (bottom right side)

Using the PAPER CLIP icon in the top panel of a Message Reply window, attach the .txt file generated by CCleaner.

 

[Oskiee]

Oskiee,

Downlaod, install, and run the free CCleaner.

After cleaning with CCleaner, then carry out this procedure:

LIST OF STARTUP PROGRAMS USING CCLEANER


CCleaner | Tasks icon | Startup tab | click on Save to text file button (bottom right side)

Using the PAPER CLIP icon in the top panel of a Message Reply window, attach the .txt file generated by CCleaner.

Its a fresh install of windows, so start up programs are a non-issue, and anyway, simply by habit im very anal of start up programs. All ive installed so far are updates and Chrome.

Ive watched the resource monitor, and some times its showing svchost as the most r/w, but even if the current tasks is clear, the HDD is still going nuts. and even with the fresh install with nothing else installed its taking atleast 7 mins to finish booting.

 

[Britton30]

Ops. Britton30 gave you quicker way to get to it. While I was still typing. Sorry.

It happens to me all the time.

 

[karlsnooks]

Oskiee.

LIST OF STARTUP PROGRAMS USING CCLEANER


CCleaner | Tasks icon | Startup tab | click on Save to text file button (bottom right side)

Using the PAPER CLIP icon in the top panel of a Message Reply window, attach the .txt file generated by CCleaner.

 

[profdlp]

...Its a fresh install of windows...

Is the Indexing service running? The first few days of any fresh install it runs almost non-stop trying to keep tabs on everything.

 

[BugMeister]

Oskiee.

LIST OF STARTUP PROGRAMS USING CCLEANER


CCleaner | Tasks icon | Startup tab | click on Save to text file button (bottom right side)

Using the PAPER CLIP icon in the top panel of a Message Reply window, attach the .txt file generated by CCleaner.

it's called Tools not Tasks

- on mine anyway..

 

[karlsnooks]

it's called Tools not Tasks

- on mine anyway..

And you, young man, are 100% correct. I thank you and will promptly change the template.

All of this time, and you are the first to say anything.

I thank you.
karl

 

[legacy7955]

I just want to add that MSE Antimalware is what is the source of most of my HDD activity, it usually writes once a second to the HDD , I have read that this is in part due to the heuristic scanning technique it uses.

Any truth to this?

I also notice that the prefetch is writing/reading alot too. Normal?

 

[karlsnooks]

legacy,
MSE is the LEAST interfering AV on the market.

You are worrying about the wrong things.

If you want to watch such things, then I recommend the Microsoft Resource Monitor. Run RESMON.EXE

 

[legacy7955]

karl:

I'm not bothered by it at all. I know MSE is very good and as far as I can tell it does very little to make a actual impact on the system resources, I also have MSE loaded on my ten year old HP pavilion 7955 Pent 4 1.5G with 1.25gigs of PC133 RAM. That machine has never run better since we bought it new and had various security suites on it like Norton which sucked the life out of it. CA wasn't much better and I caught a trojan while the PC was supposedly protected!

Just to clarify this PC HP Pavilion p6680t with the older Core i5 quad 2.8G and 6 gigs of RAM is lightening fast!

I guess what people are reacting to is the stark difference between how XP operated the HDD and how Win7 does.

As an aside I also think people are concerned that the constant read/write every second will wear out the HDD faster.

 

[carwiz]

As an aside I also think people are concerned that the constant read/write every second will wear out the HDD faster.

It's mostly writes and with write buffering, it's nil. I have a SSD and I'm not concerned with it. We'll all be looking at the bottom side of the grass by the time it will make a difference.

 

[Coke Robot]

I would definitely check with resmon.exe, like a few others have mentioned. Since it's a fresh install, there is a chance the index service might be going crazy. Type in indexing options into that Start menu and see if it says Indexing complete or something that says Indexing is reduced due to user processes? I can't remember what the last bit will say. If it says that, then indexing service might be the cause.

Also, I should ask, has the hard drive been checked for crap and was fully reformatted before install.

 

[trailerdawg1]

Just finally stopped mine from running consistantly. A toolbar updater.exe file was reading and writing to the harddrive consistanlty. It was named vupdater under services. Stop running immediately after turning it off.

 

[Greg S]

Here's a free tool for checking what's going on with files/folders.
At My Window