Vista -Loads of Hard Drive Activity

[Nox]

This thread isn't about Vista's System restore or filecopying abilities, it's about Vista's HDD thrashing due to indexing & caching systems.

or the HDD being thrashed by system restore, which was what happened in my case - it was continually trying to create restore points with data that was continually updating then starting again. Its not exactly gone off topic badly... There has certianly been a few useful opinions on system restore and IF you had to disable it people telling you to back stuff up!

Nox

[kidzer]

Is there a way to speed up the indexing, or does it already use any idle CPU time to do it?

[Funkstar]

I think it is mainly IO bound. It didn't use a lot of CPU on my laptop (Core2Duo T7200)

[aidanjt]

Is there a way to speed up the indexing, or does it already use any idle CPU time to do it?

I think there's a way to change the agressiveness of indexing, but I didn't bother remembering how and I'm using Linux atm.

[Andaho]

Ok... This is still happening, and it's not indexing or defrag. It's happening more often and it's worrying not knowing what's causing it:

I find the HD LED stays permanently on - unlike when it's operating, when it flashes. It doesn't happen all the time, but recently when it's been annoying me and I've rebooted to try and get rid of it, the POST has taken ages (at least 5 times the usual time) to identify memory and hard drives.

I'm worried there might be something faulty with one of my drives. They are new, and 2x 500gb WD AAKS. So I ran the WD diagnostics tools to check both drives, but both came up with no errors.

So any other ideas as to why the HD light sometimes stays on permanently?

[Elspuddy]

tryed a defrag ?

[this_is_gav]

Oh cock. Double post.

[this_is_gav]

I think there's a way to change the agressiveness of indexing, but I didn't bother remembering how and I'm using Linux atm.

It's in the power settings. (I realise I'm a little more than late, but meh. )

tryed a defrag ?

And that's going to improve detection time how exactly?

[chis]

Disabling indexing would, obviously, help. But increase search times. Try disabling the SuperFetch and Windows Defender services? For the latter, you'll need to go into the registry and remove the Defender command from the startup list as well, otherwise you'll get a (harmless, but irritating) error when Vista starts up.

[this_is_gav]

Disabling indexing would, obviously, help. But increase search times. Try disabling the SuperFetch and Windows Defender services? For the latter, you'll need to go into the registry and remove the Defender command from the startup list as well, otherwise you'll get a (harmless, but irritating) error when Vista starts up.

Or you could just go into the Defender options and untick a few boxes

[jabbermacy]

With a relatively new OS with MANY driver issues and general wierdness with older apps the LAST thing you should do is disable system restore! You should also GHOST your system partition at least every week (or more frequently if doing a lot of changes). Saved my butt many times with system restore and ghost.

[Nox]

have you tried temporarily disabling system restore yet?

Nox

[Andaho]

I've determined it's nothing to do with windows as I first thought. I have the machine dual booting with XP, but have hardly used XP on it, so didn't realise until today that it happens with XP too..... it must be hardware related....

It's doing it now as I type this... the HD led is permanently on. Task manager/resource monitor shows the usual tiny random spikes from system files and then return to 0% activity, and when I copy files around (that would normally make the HD LED flicker as it reads or writes) it still just permanently stays on.

When I reboot after it's been like this for a while, the POST hangs on "detecting IDE drives", sometimes for as long as 30 seconds... once or twice it's hung for over a couple minutes so I hard reboot and everything works fine again.

Are there any diagnostic tools for testing a mobo? (Gigabyte GA-P35-S3)

[usxhe190]

seems like a hard drive issue then...

if they are permanently accessing..maybe there are some bad sectors?

[Andaho]

seems like a hard drive issue then...

if they are permanently accessing..maybe there are some bad sectors?

as I said earlier in the thread, I've run the WD diagnostics tools on them both.

[usxhe190]

sorry, i forgot about that...have you tried HDTune as well?