Constant HDD Access w/Vista Ultimate 64

Oldie

Oldie

Mean Old Administrator
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I've seen some other people asking about this, but never really gotten a clear answer. I switched to Vista 64 over a month ago, and for some unknown reason, I hear nearly constant hard drive access. At first I figured it was just indexing, or super fetch, but it's been about a month now.

I've removed defrag from the task schedule, disabled indexing...I've got 2GB of ram on an E6600 and Asus P5B. My main drive is a 74GB Raptor (so you know why it must be so damn annoying) at about 40% capacity, and I've got 2x500GB, and 2x750GB drives.

Anyone have any ideas? Noise aside, I'm sure constant access isn't healthy for the drive. I'm not normally using more that 60% of my RAM.

Oh, and NOD32 was installed with updated defs before the system was even connected to the net. ;)
 
^^Yeah, forgot to stick that on the list. System Restore is off on all drives.
 
Use the resource monitor (under task manager) to see what process(es) are using the disk.
 
devil22 said:
Use the resource monitor (under task manager) to see what process(es) are using the disk.
Click to expand...

Well short of shutting down svchost....

resmon.png
 
Ah! That's automatic updates doing that. I had 3 machines with Win XP doing that to me last week. I ended up having to totally rebuild them because of it. I hope you have better luck.
 
No, there are no automatic updates available. Besides, short of mulit-gig patches, I don't know what kind of update could keep it running for a month.
 
Neither did I, but it was the same svchost and wuauclt,exe that were using the hard drive so much. I left one of the systems going overnight (14 hours total) to see if it would evetually quit, but it still wouldn't. The only thing thatmade it stop was reimaging it.
 
what file is svchost accessing? I can't see because your file column is too short.
 
How long have you had the install for?

The first few weeks of install for Vista can result in a lot of hard drive thrashing, it's doing a lot of things including indexing the users files for faster indexing, it also does a lot work monitoring your habbits so it can pre-load files etc, system restore will also cause a fair bit of write operations as it makes copies of your files.


This settles down after the first few weeks, if it's still doing after that it might be a specific problem relating to an application you have installed, ideally we need to see what file(s) that process is reading/writing to.
 
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