Constant HDD Activity?

Well, I've noticed that on my T400 I can hear the HDD spinning constantly, it's sort of scratchy noise that I would expect to hear during moments of heavy HDD usage and if I put my head real close to the palm rest I can hear it beeping. The HDD activity light flashes occasionally but this other noise is more constant, I can only imagine it coming from the HDD but I cannot tell what may be accessing it.

It's driving me nuts, any ideas?

 

Hi usapatriot,

It is possible that your OS is indexing your HDD?

And yeah, I get very irritated when that happens as it chokes up the entire system and slows down my computer usage & web surfing experience. It's worse under Win XP compared with Vista. I've used both: so I know.

It's yet another reason why I'm staying away from Win XP after reluctantly trying Vista. The other is the interminable wait to bring up the Task Manager through ctrl-alt-del to kill off a process that went rouge and hogging system resources under Win XP.

Under Vista, it's a near-instantaneous response which allows me to nip the offending process in the bud and carry on being productive. Under XP? Pfft! It's power button down to do a reboot when it fails to respond.

 

The thing is, the system does not feel sluggish at all and I paused indexing and the sound is still going on. I'm certain I do not have any scanners or programs running the background doing any scheduled tasks, I will have to look further into this matter.

 

i'm using vista 64
i've disabled indexing, superfetch, and defragmenting
the harddrive is still always spinning! i would really like to know whats causing this

 

Have you tried shutting Superfetch off?

 

I rebooted the system and after the OS finished loading it stopped making the "busy" HDD noise. I had been using hibernate and standby constantly throughout the day, I wonder if it has something to do with it.

EDIT: Indexing, Superfetch, and Defragment should not be constantly using the HDD, unless you've never run them before or just copied over a lot of new files and installed a lot of new programs. Besides, indexing and superfetch are main features of the OS that should not be disabled as they provide a lot of functionality.

I don't think they are the cause, it may be something due to the 64-bit OS though which I am running, my pagefile is set to 512MB, I have 4GB of RAM, should not be a problem.

 

Shouldn't wee keep Superfetch?

With a clean install to 64bit, my computer is so much more responsive!! Maybe it's just the Diskeeper and Tuneup effects.

 

Different people have different opinions on this. There are a few threads on this in the Windows forum. I like to shut mine off.

 

It could be that Lenovo Rescue and Recovery is set to backup the the system drive periodically, maybe every week or so. Durring a backup the harddrive would be very busy.

enter "rescue and recovery" in the vista search bar to find the rescue and recovery application. check what its settings are.

 

That is the worse thing you could do.

 

Different strokes for different folks.

 

Unless you have an SSD, in which case it doesn't really matter.

I leave those things on on systems with a standard harddrive as the primary drive, and turn them off on systems with an SSD.

 

I'm pretty sure I never even setup Rescue and Recovery, but I'll have a look at that.

EDIT: Where does Rescue and Recovery store backups? Seems like it may have been the problem, it was scheduled to backup automatically at 12AM last night when I was having all the HDD activity.

 

Lenovo's Rescue and Recovery stores backups to the same hidden disk partition that is used to store the info needed to return your harddrive to the "factory state" i.e. exactly as it was when it left the factory.

In addition to returning the hard drive to the factory state, rescue and recovery can be used to backup the system in its current state, which may of caused all that disk activity. Since the hidden partition has limited space rescue and recovery only stores a certain number of image backups, when it runs out of room it overwrites the oldest image with the new one. You'll have to check the settings to see when it is scheduled to do backups.

In my opinion rescue and recovery is to hard and confusing to use for backup purposes, for a consumer that is, maybe not for a company IT department. I tried using it to write backups to a network drive instead of the hidden partition, and it just didn't work. If you truly want to use it for backup purposes you'll have to test it out to make sure it can actually restore a backup it creates.

Rescue and recovery is also used to burn your restore disks. You only get to make these once and then it won't do it again, so don't loose them Like I lost mine. You use restore disks to "restore" your harddrive, or a new harddrive, to the state it was in when your compute left the factory.

I consider Acronis software better than Lenovo's rescue and recovery software for backing up disk images. I use acronis TrueImage for imaging, and Acronis Disk Director for partitioning. I use XP though, havn't checked out there software for vista.

Hope this made sense.

 

Well, on my system, Lenovo's partitions no longer exist and I did not make any backups because my lappy does not have a DVD burner.

Your right though, I backup my documents using Mozy and any other data to DVD's.

 

is there any way to monitor what is using the harddrive?

 

I haven't had a chance to try this out. It's for Vista only.

Link:
http://forums.hexus.net/operating-s...ta-loads-hard-drive-activity.html#post1228329

Re: Vista -Loads of Hard Drive Activity
Vista Tip:
Right-click the task bar, click Task Manager
Switch to the Performance tab, click Resource Monitor (UAC prompt as this is an admin task)
(Close Task Manager)
In Resource Monitor, expand the Disk section

Here you can see the most recently accessed files, which process instigated the I/O, the process' I/O priority, the response time, bytes/min read and written.
Very handy when looking at performance issues without needing to fire up PerfMon.