Hard Drive Hitting

Good day. Here's my problem; for some reason, my machine hits the hard drive, whether I'm doing something or not, about once a second...like a metronome.

I have a Dell XPS2 Laptop, 2.0GB PM, 2Gb ram, 100Gb Hitachi 7200rpm hard drive. I run XP home.

I have no idea if it's an issue or not. It doesn't really seem to be effecting performance but I really don't know. I have already disabled disk indexing. It didn't seem to make any difference.

It continues even if I shut down all of my applications, in task manager, though I still have 50 or so processes running.

I know this is vague but I welcome suggestions.

Thanks.

 

To add a couple of points; I have run ad-aware, spybot, avast and defender. My machine seems to be pretty clean of virii and other nasties.

This activity occurs whether I'm connected to the internet or not.

I imagine it's an auto updating thing and mostly harmless but I would like to identify it.

 

By the machine hitting the hard drive do you mean you can hear a sort of clicking noise from it?It could be your drive is on its way to HD heaven.Is it an old HD.Try run a few diagnostics on it and see what it comes up with.

 

First make sure it really is the hard drive making the noise, not a fan or a CD/floppy left in a drive.

 

Yah...it's the hard drive. By hitting, I mean accessing. It makes the typical hard drive reading/writing sounds and the sounds it makes correspond with the hdd light flashing.

I have discounted the possibility of the spindle failing because I would expect to hear a more continuous noise and it wouldn't be as perfectly synced with the hdd light.

It's not much of an explanation but it's all I have to work with at the moment.

 

OK so something is repeatedly accessing your hard drive.

Windows does this all the time - It's called the page or swop file. It happens especially if you don't have enough memory.

Some programs do this as well, for instance Google toolbar indexing service, and Windows indexing service do this whenever they think you are quiet.

Some automatic updates (not only windows) do this. As can other scheduled tasks.

Some malware also does this for less honourable reasons.

Judging from your system details you have already started the hunt. 50 processes sounds like alot with no programs running. I would be suspicious if you had many instances of svchost.

 

Ok...I finally clued in that I could prioritise processes in Task Manager based on CPU usage. There is this moving train of processes that is occupying my hdd, for about 1 second at a time, which I now suspect is the refresh schedule.

System idle process
Explorer.exe
Cpf.exe
Svchost.exe
Lsass.exe
Firefox.exe
I8kfangui.exe
Speedswitch.exe

I have 9 instances of svchost.exe but only one shows active in task manager at a time.

I am slowly coming to the conclusion that this is probably a normal(ish) monitoring thing and I will just have to live with it. I don't recall seeing this action on other machines but maybe I just wasn't looking for it.

It would be nice to stop the silliness but we can't have everything, eh...?

Still, if anyone thinks of anything else, bring it on.

Thanks

 

I am experiencing the same problem as Joe on my 6-year old Compaq Armada M700. What bothers me is that the constant disk activity prevents the disk from ever spinning down, and I am using this old machine as sort of a information kiosk in my home. I don't want the disk spinning 24x7.

This machine has a clean install of Windows XP SP2, with no Internet connection, no apps running, I've run the MS Process Monitor (download from http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/utilities/processmonitor.mspx), and after a minute, find no registry activity, and no file system activity.

The process that remains most active is lass.exe.

And the disk access continues, confirmed by the disk light, and by listening to the disk spin (the cpu fan is quiet).

I would love to find a way to configure XP so that this activity stops.

It seems to me that if the machine has nothing to do, it should do nothing!

 

The problem is your computer is ALWAYS doing something. Even when you are not.

Disk activity is nothing to worry about. It is NOT something you will EVER eliminate while the machine is running full tilt.

You can however, turn off the hard drives after USER inactivity, with Microsoft's power saving options. Here's how:

1. Right-click a blank area on the desktop, and select 'Properties'
2. On the 'Display Properties' dialog, select the 'Screen Saver' tab
3. Under 'Monitor Power', press the 'Power' button
4. Under the settings for your power scheme, change the value in the drop down menu next to 'Turn Off Hard Disks'
5. Apply your settings

 

Thanks for the reply!

My problem is that even though I have the hard drive set to turn off after 3 minutes, it never does. My assumption is that this is because of the continued system activity.

My goal is simply to have the hard drive power down when the computer is unused for hours or days at a time. Currently this never happens.

Suggestions?

 

I would use a startup manager to stop all the processes you don't need when you boot your pc up so you can eliminate having so many things accessing your hard drives during use.

 

I will check this evening as soon as I get home. I'll post results tonight!

 

Well, further investigation revealed two things:

1. The disk activity light flashing once per second was not showing hard drive activity. Rather, it is the system checking to see if there is a CD in the optical drive. If I remove the optical drive from the laptop, the light goes off.

2. My hard drive does indeed shut down. What I thought was the drive spinning was in fact the CPU primary fan. Removing a large dustball from it substantially quieted down

So even though there are several processes running, and every minute IE checks the hard drive for some reason, the disk still spins down after a few minutes.

 

Thanks for the feedback.

 

I've been away for a while but I was pretty much resigned to live with the hdd thing...then I tried rpohara's idea of taking the cd out of the tray...and now the thing is much less active. Good call. Thanks.