Comments on: What the heck is grinding my hard drive?

Question: What the heck is grinding my hard drive?

crazyray — Wed, 23 Nov 2005 23:33:07 -0800

Is there any Windows XP utility that will tell me what program is accessing my hard drive?

My Dell Latitude D600 as recently started grinding the hard drive **constantly** for periods of 10-30 minutes, for no apparent reason whatsoever. I have plenty of RAM- 512 MB- which is rarely more than half used- so not a result of virtual memory. I have recently upgraded Firefox to 1.5, and I also recently updated Windows Defender (aka Microsoft Anti-spyware) to Beta 2. I tried disabling Windows Defender, but... gee, thanks to Sony's recent DRM shenanigans, Microsoft won't let you totally disable it any more because of fear of root kits.
I have run spyware scans, trendmicro housecall, NAV, HijackThis!, you name it... nothing is showing up as resource intensive. Furthermore, when I cntl-alt-delete, process manager doesn't show any unusual CPU activity during the HD access (which is really, really heavy for 20+ minutes at a time)
I am asking- is there any way to tell which app is accessing the HD? What I am envisioning is something that shows a list of apps, and what the bandwidth is to and from the hard drive

This is a Dell Latitude, D600, 1.59 Gig/ 512 MB of RAM, Windows XP SP2, 4 gigabytes free on HD.
Also (this may not be related whatsoever) the Windows Key (between CNTL and ALT on the keyboard) has recently stopped functioning. Control-escape still works though

By: sbutler

sbutler — Wed, 23 Nov 2005 23:38:38 -0800

SysInternals has some File and Disk Utilities. Probably Filemon or Diskmon will do what you want.

By: sbutler

sbutler — Wed, 23 Nov 2005 23:51:58 -0800

Also, I don't know what's causing your trashing but if it's the OS then the utilities might not show anything.

For example, HFS+ (the MacOS file system) has a feature called "adaptive hot file clustering". Basically, frequently used files are defragmented on the fly. When my disk gets close to full (~8GB out of 74GB) I notice it spends more time thrashing and I blame it on the optimization features like hot file clustering. Windows and NTFS might be doing something similar.

By: moift

moift — Thu, 24 Nov 2005 00:02:14 -0800

This doesn't answer the specific question, but are you doing anything with Java? (JavaScript doesn't count) For some reason the JVM grinds the shit out of the hard drive periodically, even when it doesn't have much to do.

By: moift

moift — Thu, 24 Nov 2005 00:14:04 -0800

Trying to find a more helpful answer, I came across this thread asking for exactly the same thing. There are a few suggestions of possible culprits and a link to some software that looks promising but I can't get to download correctly. I can access the page though, so hopefully you'll have more luck.

By: Ethereal Bligh

Ethereal Bligh — Thu, 24 Nov 2005 02:45:14 -0800

That sysinternals drive monitor tool is the best tool I can think of to see exactly what happening on your drive in realtime. You'll know if it's an app. And it might be in these days of eighteen bazillion little apps running. Otherwise, it well maybe be your virtual mem paging file(s). Try changing those—best would be to have none on all drives except one, which is defragmented, and then see what happens. I used to always have a seperate partition for my virtual mem. I don't know why I stopped doing that. And I now trust Windows much more than I used to to control the virtual mem and drive caching. Anyway, use those sysinternal tools. Both the drive monitoring tool and the proccess monitoring tool. (The latter can replace the Win task manager.)

By: Ethereal Bligh

Ethereal Bligh — Thu, 24 Nov 2005 02:47:43 -0800

I just noticed that you only have 512M RAM on your laptop. XP will be going to the paging files quite a bit with 512M. Having the win key stop working is strange.

If this activity is as regular as you say, then that drive monitoring tool should be very useful.

By: Ethereal Bligh

Ethereal Bligh — Thu, 24 Nov 2005 02:48:21 -0800

Indexing could be on, too.

By: chuma

chuma — Thu, 24 Nov 2005 07:12:35 -0800

You should be able to use Task Manager to see what's doing tons of read/writes as well.

Right-click a blank area on the task bar and choose Task Manager. Choose the Processes tab, then View->Select Columns from the menu. Check off "I/O Reads" and "I/O Writes", click OK, then sort the list by one of these columns.

On my Win2k box right now, Norton Antivirus has done about 10x more I/O reads than any other application.

By: Sharcho

Sharcho — Thu, 24 Nov 2005 07:22:44 -0800

The easiest way is using the Windows Task Manager. The fields you need to look at are:
CPU, Mem Usage, Page Faults, VM Size, I/O Read Bytes, I/O Write Bytes, I/O Other Bytes

By: Who_Am_I

Who_Am_I — Thu, 24 Nov 2005 08:34:23 -0800

One of the monitors (Disk Activity) in Desktop Sidebar will tell you how much of your disk accss bandwidth you are using, and will list the processes in order of operations per second. So if one thing is really chewing up your disk, it will be at the top of the list.