Sporadic, self-initiated disk activity

[ducksoup0]

Typically, I might be not using my computer, and only have very few applications running on it, and yet I can still hear the hard drive becoming active every so often, for what seems like no reason at all. I checked memory usage, and it is low; and I checked Indexing service, and it is off. So what could this be? It is rather annoying, and might it indicate something undesirable running in the background (but this is a fresh install)?

 

[drag]

Well, your going to have some disk activity ever so often.

Your OS will page data out of memory once in a while. You have system logs that have to maintained, too, you know.

Also Windows probably uses a asyncronous filing system for speed. Which means when you write to a file or your disk it may not immediately write everything to disk. It does that so that your OS doesn't get hung up writing to disk, or if you have another application reading from disk it won't get interrupted and stuff like that. Tends to increase the responsiveness and performacne of the OS. So during periods between disk usage your OS is going to take the time to flush out the buffers to disk and stuff like that.

So there are times when the OS is legitamently going to access the disk when your not expecting it. There are ways to supress certain types of disk activity so that you can accomplish things like leaving a harddrive in a laptop in sleep mode (or whatever) to conserve some battery power. But worrying about it on a desktop isn't realy worth the effort.

Now if it's the noise that is bothering you, then buy a quieter case/harddrive next time or throw a blanket over it or something.

 

[ducksoup0]

Well I know about those concerns. But unless Windows is constantly updating its logs on disk, the activity seems to happen far more often than warranted even by asynchronous disk access. I can be sitting off to the side for half an hour, or more, and Windows just continues to thrash the disk for minutes at a time, pausing every so often.

I don't know how aggressively Windows caches files in memory. Is it trying to anticipate my next action, and constantly loading and reloading data from the hd into ram?

 

[drag]

No, that would be innefficient, I think... How would it know what to load up?

I was thinking was that the light would light up for a half a second or so and you hear the drive kicking in and such... but if it goes on for minutes without you doing anything, then that's troubling.

If you think that it could be a spyware program running or something and you have more then one computer on a network, you could setup a packet sniffer on the second computer and see if your computer is being accessed over the network. (it'd work on a wireless network or a network connected by a normal hub... a network with a switch or a router instead of a hub will isolate machines from that sort of thing and make packet sniffing more difficult)

Maybe disconnect your machine from the network and see if it still happens? All I can think of besides that is the normal anti-spyware stuff, check the running programs out, see if there is any weird background proccesses going on, check out msconfig's startup tab to see if any programs are set to start up on boot-up that you don't know about, use virus/adaware/spybot scanners, etc etc etc. (I am sure you know the drill)

But it shouldn't go on and on like that for more then a second or two unless your running out of RAM or are reading/writing files from the disk...

 

[ducksoup0]

It does seem to be something about windows; I've only had this install for about a week now. I'll see what I can do about checking for network activity. Got any ideas about checking for disk activity? Like "lsof" in Linux?