Windows 7 continuos use of hard drive

[Discovery]

Hi - I did a clean install of W7 Ultimate on a duo-quad machine and it is always using the disk and many time thrasing it to death --- especially if I step away and leave machine idle (i.e. then, it thrashes moreso). I have 16GB or RAM and a 16 GB page file on a separate disk (separate from main W7) and am using PNY Quadro 440 monitor car for 4 monitors with a 2 TB hard drive with plenty of free space (more than half).

I have looked to see where is IO is happening and it is in two SCVHOST processes. I looked to see what services they were and each is about 8 services, most of which can not be stopped. If the machine thrashes for a 20 minute period and then it is idle for a long time (say 20 minutes) the thrashing stops, then after another 20 minutes it starts again. But, it seems that there is alsway some type of disk activity on the machine when it is not thrashing and no programs are running.

I did AVG scan and no virus, etc. is found. I am the administor but it thinks I am not (I have admin properties when I look) so the SFC can not be run. Any ideas or tools that you know of that can diagnose this type of thing?

Thanks for any help.

 

[sminlal]

First of all it's quite normal for Windows to be doing continuous I/O in the background. It's normally a very small amount, around 100 - 200K bytes per second.

If you have more than that going on then it's likely due to either virus scanning or indexing. When you first install Windows it will index the entire drive. Once it's done, though, it only indexes updates and that's a much lower level of activity.

 

[Hawkeye22]

Also, if you are trying to run SFC from a command prompt, be sure to open the command prompt as administrator. That is right-click on cmd.exe and select "run as administrator".

 

[Branden]

it's quite normal for windows to thrash the hdd after a fresh install, it shouldn't affect performance while you're using it, and it'll cool down after a while (days).
but there are steps you can take to minimize the thrashing: disable indexing, disable or reschedule defragmentation, disable superfetching, disable virtual memory, disbale or reschedule virus scans...