What is hitting my HDD

RubberDuckie · Post by **RubberDuckie** » Thu Jan 06, 2011 7:28 pm

For days now my HDD will be active for hours. Sometimes it will slow down my computer, most of the time not. I have a 75G Raptor HDD so it is noisy when I have HDD activity. Right now as I type you would think I am saving a 20Gig file to the HDD. Is there a way to see what is accessing my HDD?
I am running windows 7 64bit... This installation is 6 months old so I doubt win7 is indexing anything. This is driving me nuts to the point I have to turn my computer off when not in use and to sleep.

b-man1 · Post by **b-man1** » Thu Jan 06, 2011 8:34 pm

open up the resource monitor in W7 and sort the disk activity by transfer rate...that should show the process(es) hitting it.

RubberDuckie · Post by **RubberDuckie** » Thu Jan 06, 2011 8:50 pm

I am guessing it is AVG in this case... Time to uninstall and see if that helps. It is freaking crazy.

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Thu Jan 06, 2011 10:25 pm

Yeah I'm not happy with AVG anymore. 9.0 started being bloated and 2011 is very bloated. It also seems to do a lot of aggressive disk scanning whenever it thinks the PC is idle.

For Win7 I'd recommend Microsoft Security Essentials.

DaMaN · Post by **DaMaN** » Fri Jan 07, 2011 12:17 am

Iam having the same issue with perfmon.exe on the kids computer. Is it safe to disable this in Windows Vista?

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Fri Jan 07, 2011 12:27 am

Vista does a LOT of background disk access. It's integral to the OS. Even disabling unnecessary services doesn't help. It's something to do with the way it does background caching. Win7 is MUCH more efficient at it. Biggest reason right there to upgrade to Win7 IMO.

DaMaN · Post by **DaMaN** » Fri Jan 07, 2011 12:33 am

hmmmmm....you making me get the upgrade itch LOL. Thanks FP.

I did find this and will try it to see..

Press <WINDOWS_KEY>+<R> to open the Run box
Type "perfmon", without quotes, and press <ENTER>. You will nedd to respond to a UAC prompt.
Under "Monitoring Tools", right-click on "Performance Monitor", them select "Properties"
Turn off "Sample Automatically"
Click OK
I'm not sure how effective this will be, but it's worth a shot.

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Fri Jan 07, 2011 12:40 pm

LMK if that helps. Might be useful for clients with low-end systems who are still running Vista.

DaMaN · Post by **DaMaN** » Sun Jan 09, 2011 12:20 pm

FlyingPenguin wrote:LMK if that helps. Might be useful for clients with low-end systems who are still running Vista.

Not really FP. Next chance i get i am going to install Windows 7 on this affected PC.