Harddrive grinding when idling: normal for Vista?

R

Rainbow Man

Veteran
It's driving me absolutely nucking futs!

The OS keeps chugging away on the harddrive for what feels like half an hour any time I make some kind of change, like installing a program.

WHAT IS IT DOING? And why? Where do I turn this nonsense off? I know there was some form of rudimentary defragger in XP - that wasn't very effective I believe (nor intrusive either I might add) - but if this is the son of built-in XP defrag then it's a bastard child and I want it begone.

Anyone have an idea what's going on here? Any input greatly appreciated. Thanks.
Peace.
 
It will also try to swap memory from processes that isn't being used.
Or, the bootup/shutdown check-list is being optimized.
Or, it will be defender looking for bad stuff.
Or, it could be windows update making a catalogue of your system.
Or,....

:D

You get my point, it seems to be doing a lot of stuff in the background for you and it can be scary. They went a wee bit over the top in my opinion...
 
Yeah I'm beginning to think it might be the defender thingy.

I didn't even know it was there! There's SO much new stuff in the control panel in vista. It'll take forever sorting it all through.

Peace.
 
Try keeping task manager open so that you can check the guilty process.
Even if it's svchost.exe you'll be able to check the services it runs by using the context menus.
 
I believe you are enjoying Vista's HDD indexing. A Vista rig I built did this for days. With a Raptor, it gets old quick. But it did finish finally.
 
t0y said:
Try keeping task manager open so that you can check the guilty process.
Click to expand...
Process manager doesn't tell me what program's chewing on the HDD or does it? It might not be using much CPU. Generally I can't see much deflection on my CPU load graphs when it sits there crunching away so it could be hard to track it that way..

swaaye said:
I believe you are enjoying Vista's HDD indexing.
Click to expand...
Ehm... What could it POSSIBLY be indexing when installing programs? It sits there rattling on the harddrive for ten fifteen minutes. Almost all the data in a game or demo's gonna be binary stuff that can't be indexed..

I swear I'll never learn to understand microsoft even if I live to be 150 years old.

Peace.
 
Rainbow Man said:
Process manager doesn't tell me what program's chewing on the HDD or does it? It might not be using much CPU. Generally I can't see much deflection on my CPU load graphs when it sits there crunching away so it could be hard to track it that way..
Click to expand...

You can add columns to the task manager display (Processes... View->Select Columns... under XP at least), if you add those which are related to I/O it's relatively easy to sit and watch which processes have numbers which are increasing rapidly.
 
In Vista it's fairly easy to see what's taking up resources, such as Disk IO, and even find out what files are being accessed.

  • START Menu
  • Search
  • Type "Monitor"
  • Select "Reliability and Performance Monitor"
  • Top most view of "Reliability and Performance" shows the Resource Overview
Or
  • Task Manager
  • Performance Tab
  • Resource Monitor

From there, select the Disk section. The largest users/consumers should filter up to the top. If not, you can sort by Read or Write columns.
 
Thanks Brit, I found my culprit using that monitor thingy.

Problem is.. The process's marked as "system" only - whatever that means - and it apparantly writes a heck of a lot to a file in c:\system volume information\ + a looong long uckfer of a registry key.

I've absolutely no idea what that is or what it means.

Perhaps it's something to do with that damn system restore. But I thought that one only cared about DLLs and junk like that. Not every freakin' file on the harddrive!

I can't even look inside that damn folder to see what it's doing there. It's STILL writing...stuff...into it and explorer's giving me access denied error when I try to look at it. It also lists as 0 bytes on the harddrive which is pretty much impossible. WTH! You're holding NO secrets from me you damn whore's son of an operating system! I'll beat you yet just you wait..

Maybe if I boot you into failsafe mode you'll let me peek at what you've squirreled away on my own damn harddrive. If not.. Well we'll see. I'll think of something.

Peace.
 
Rainbow Man said:
Problem is.. The process's marked as "system" only - whatever that means - and it apparantly writes a heck of a lot to a file in c:\system volume information\ + a looong long uckfer of a registry key.
Click to expand...
I believe that's system restore either creating an automatic restore point or deleting old restore points.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
System restore really does grind your hard drive. Any new software or updates installed and your up for 10 mins of noise, which isnt too nice when you have a raptor.

I just disabled it all together, no use when you got a nice clean ghost you can use if something goes wrong.

Quickest way to get to that resource monitor is to type "perfmon" in the search bar.
 
Albuquerque said:
No, quickest way is to type perfmon into the run bar ;) (WindowsKey + R)
Click to expand...

The search bar doubles as a run bar.

I disable system restore because i've never had to use it and it just uses up resources like this.
 
I've got a monitor that makes high-frequency warbles (barely audible... more of just an uber-tiny whine) that goes on and off when it's in power save mode. Basically it's in time with the flashing power light on the front.

As far as disk acitivity and backups and whatnot: I'd disable the file indexing service unless you're actually going to depend upon the OS search functionality to find things. I'd leave a small fraction of the drive set aside for restore points... rolling back a crapy driver sometimes works with that.

For system backups there are a lot of options, and Ghost has already been mentioned. I'm partial to Acronis TrueImage. Especially from the standpoint of being able to build BartPE discs with TrueImage and Disk Director on them. (As well as the XP or Vista sources, if you get frisky.) It's a good all-in-one solution for backup/restore/partitioning/imaging/etc.

When building a new system I like to boot from the BartPE disc, partition with Disk Director, and then lay down the XP source files (/i386 folder) to the hard drive, then run setup with an unattended install answer file. If the network/storage drivers are built into the BartPE disc, the setup process stuffs them into the driver cache on the machine as it builds. Nice to *never* have to dig out the CD when making changes to the system. ;)

By the way, are those hybrid drives available yet? (The hard drives that have embedded flash or nand memory.) I remember them being touted as a new solution for Vista speediness. Anyone have one?
 
Malo said:
The search bar doubles as a run bar.

I disable system restore because i've never had to use it and it just uses up resources like this.
Click to expand...

Sure, but you still have to click on the result. Run just executes a command without any extra clicks.
 
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