Windows 7 seeking

[Dean C]

As anyone who has a WD Raptor knows, we try to eliminate seeking on the drive as much as possible because of the racket it makes. I have noticed that without fail if I leave windows 7 idle for between 5-10minutes it starts seeking and making my drive sound like a chainsaw. I'm not sure what it's doing. I've tried looking in "ProcessMonitor" but too much is happening to figure it out. After about 5-10minutes of seeking it stops again. Oddly, if I move the mouse during any time the drive is seeking, it stops also.

Any ideas what it might be? I've turned off indexing on the drive. I'm fairly sure it's not any specific application as I've tested to see if it happens without any applications running (that aren't integral to the OS).

 

[tony22]

I've been looking at this myself on my WB Blacks. How did you turn off Indexing? Did you do it by right clicking on the drive in File Manager? If so you may want to also check the Indexing panel, which you can find by opening up the Control Panel and typing "Indexing" in the search window. That's a whole separate set of entries that also seems to be related to Indexing. I'm not sure what the relationship is between these and what turning it on or off from File Manager does.

 

[Dean C]

I've been looking at this myself on my WB Blacks. How did you turn off Indexing? Did you do it by right clicking on the drive in File Manager? If so you may want to also check the Indexing panel, which you can find by opening up the Control Panel and typing "Indexing" in the search window. That's a whole separate set of entries that also seems to be related to Indexing. I'm not sure what the relationship is between these and what turning it on or off from File Manager does.

Yep I right clicked the drive and did it that way. I can't see anything in this section of the control panel that would disable it altogether. I presumed the drive option would do that. Also I'm still not even sure if it's indexing that's causing the seek.

 

[tony22]

Open up the Control Panel and type in "Indexing" (no quotes) in the upper right search window. The first item that comes up will be Indexing Options. Click on that and see what's still activated.

 

[Wishmaster]

Indexing, Prefetch, Superfetch can all be culprits.

How long have you had Win 7 running? the thrashing around is fairly common the first few days, but normally after a week or less it'll settle down.

theres also your AV software and Windows defrag that will cause activity from time to time.

 

[gregrocker]

Is that sound in any way "normal?"

Download WD Data Lifeguard and burn to CD. Run full test to diagnose/repair.

Here is a good bootable version of Lifeguard put out by Gateway which works on almost any HD make: View attachment 46087