Analyze hard drive activity

[dragonreborn]

every once and awhile my hard drive (either the 150 raptor or the 2tb caviar black) works very hard. I'm not really doing anything intensive, just browsing around, maybe opening a small program and it will start accessing what seems a ton of stuff and slows down my system.

Seasonic X750 (awesome)
MSI Neo2-FR
Intel Q9450 @ 3GHz
4GB Patriot DDR2 PC8500
BFG 8800GTS 512 OC
WD Raptor 150GB
WD Caviar Black 2TB
2x ASUS 204L1T

is there any way to have some sort of hard drive monitor to see what is slowing it down? i try to do task manager/performance/processes but it's not really helpful. And the cpu is not working that hard while this is happening. pretty much just the hard drive(s) and they aren't exactly slow drives (not ssd fast but they can move.)

thanks!

 

[ulysses35]

Resource monitor in Vista does show some info on HDD useage. I suspect it is more than likely framentation of your HDD.

Try using a thrid party defragmentor... Diskeeper lite is free from

www.majorgeeks.com

and works pretty well

 

[hwy2hell]

Could be virus scan working in background. McAfee is notorious for that.

 

[sminlal]

is there any way to have some sort of hard drive monitor to see what is slowing it down?

-> Press Ctrl/Shift/Esc to open Task Manager.
-> Click the "Performance" tab.
-> Click the "Resource Monitor..." button

-> In Resource Montior, click the "Disk" tab.
-> In the "Processes with Disk Activity" pane, click the "Total (B/sec)" column to sort by total disk activity.

...the process with the highest B/sec is probably the culprit.

 

[fazers_on_stun]

The first thing I would check is to see if Indexing is turned on (default on all hard discs in XP). In Windows Explorer, right-click on the drive root and choose Properties. At the bottom uncheck the indexing box, then click OK to turn indexing off for the drive contents including subfolders. XP tends to run the indexing service every few hours and it can slow down data transfer from that drive...

 

[dragonreborn]

hey all...thank you so much for your replies!

I actually, on a hunch, went through my list of programs thinking what could possible be constantly but somewhat randomly slowing down my hard drives and bam, the obvious one hit me: Mozy backup. I reinstalled it and forgot to schedule the backups so it was on constant backup. Duh. I turned it back to only back once a day at 3am and all seems good!

that said, i really like the disk monitor in the resource monitor section. That's awesome. never knew that was there!

thanks again

 

[Mousemonkey]

This topic has been closed by Mousemonkey