High Background HDD Activity Win7?

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Hiyruu

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Not all the time, but intense periodic bursts, what could be causing it?

I think It's from a service in svchost.exe

Could it be BITS service? Instead of disabling BITS I just changed windows update settings to full manual (don't check). I will see if the hdd activity still happens.
 
I think you can sort processes by HDD reads / writes in the Task Manager. Maybe that'll show the culprit.

I find that after I get a Windows update, and the machine is idle for awhile, the CPU fan kicks up indicating CPU usage. I think in that case it's recompiling some libraries for the new updates.
 
Snowknight26 said:
Check Resource Monitor and see which process is reading/writing files.
Click to expand...

It says svchost.exe But that could be any number of services that use svchost.

I ran Process Explorer too, it at least shows what services are tied into svchost, like BITS for example. But when I check the threads tab it just shows ntdll with high activity. I've yet to find the actual service within svchost that is causing the activity.
 
For me (now on 8.1 but the same thing happened on 7) Symantec Endpoint and windows updates show up in svchost.exe. I have been watching this for a long time because at work I have been plagued by seemingly random periods of high disk activity on my i7 860 box with 16GB of ram. If it were not for a very tight budget I would request a couple of 1TB ssds however I can not do that now. One of my problems is as a software developer I have easily over 5 million files on my hard drives.
 
drescherjm said:
For me (now on 8.1 but the same thing happened on 7) Symantec Endpoint and windows updates show up in svchost.exe. I have been watching this for a long time because at work I have been plagued by seemingly random periods of high disk activity on my i7 860 box with 16GB of ram. If it were not for a very tight budget I would request a couple of 1TB ssds however I can not do that now. One of my problems is as a software developer I have easily over 5 million files on my hard drives.
Click to expand...

Well setting my Windows Update to full manual (don't ever check) actually seems to have fixed the issue, but it's only been a day or so,

I think this works because BITS is used to constantly check for updates, and affects some systems with high hdd activity. I will have to manually check for updates now, but I prefer it that way anyway.

I also unchecked the program boxes in Adobe updater. I don't think that was the issue though.
 
Hiyruu said:
I think this works because BITS is used to constantly check for updates, and affects some systems with high hdd activity. I will have to manually check for updates now, but I prefer it that way anyway.
Click to expand...

BITS = ???
 
It is probably VSS (Volume Shadow copy Service). It is a supporting and required service used by System Restore and keeping old versions of files to use the features in the Previous Versions tab of File Properties. I think by default Windows is set to use up to 40% (!) of your total hard drive space for shadow copies. You can reduce the size to a different percentage or hard value by using the VSSAdmin command line program, or disable it completely. I would not disable it completely unless you also disable System Restore. I set mine to 5%, or 50GB of a 1TB drive.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee923636(v=ws.10).aspx
 
Windows 7 is logging a lot of pointless stuff in the background
You can prevent most of it without wasting too much time
But preventing it completely would probably take weeks
You have to do things like replacing system files/folders with hard links into nothing
Not worth the effort imo
 
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