How can I find out why my PC is continually writing to hard drive?
March 15, 2021 6:38 PM Subscribe
On my idle PC, I can hear the hard drive being accessed. I think it's interfering with my Zoom conferences. Using Task Manager, I noticed that Google Chrome is writing to the disk even when I've quit and shut down the browser window. What could be causing that? The other heavy users are System, and something called Realtek Bluetooth BTDevManager Service Application. What the heck? What can I do about this?
Closing the Chrome browser window doesn't completely quit Chrome. I don't use it anymore, but I know there is an option to close out background tasks when you close the browser.
posted by lhauser at 8:05 PM on March 15, 2021
posted by lhauser at 8:05 PM on March 15, 2021
Procmon can help you dig into what's going on better than Task Manager.
posted by Candleman at 8:10 PM on March 15, 2021 [2 favorites]
posted by Candleman at 8:10 PM on March 15, 2021 [2 favorites]
There are a whole bunch of reasons a machine may access the hard drive, consistent continual access to the disk may indicate it's using swap space pretty consistently because it's out of physical memory (RAM) (this can vary by operating system, and generation of operating system).
There are generally two things to consider that are reasonably affordable to do these days:
The first is to figure out what kind of RAM your machine takes and see if it's at it's maximum (or at least at 16gb), if it's not it's usually pretty affordable to bump this up.
The second is more elaborate and involves migrating from a drive that spins (this is the clacking and clicking you often here - the magnets moving the read head of the drive across the platters in the drive stack), to a solid state drive (SSD) that is compatible with your system. Now there is a lot more involved in doing this and it can be more expensive but it's generally the single most effective thing you can do to improve your systems performance if it's using spinning disk drive.
I'd start with the first and strongly consider doing the second, but both should be done with the guidance of a friend who has experience with doing these types of upgrades and backing up the computer before doing them.
posted by iamabot at 8:43 PM on March 15, 2021
There are generally two things to consider that are reasonably affordable to do these days:
The first is to figure out what kind of RAM your machine takes and see if it's at it's maximum (or at least at 16gb), if it's not it's usually pretty affordable to bump this up.
The second is more elaborate and involves migrating from a drive that spins (this is the clacking and clicking you often here - the magnets moving the read head of the drive across the platters in the drive stack), to a solid state drive (SSD) that is compatible with your system. Now there is a lot more involved in doing this and it can be more expensive but it's generally the single most effective thing you can do to improve your systems performance if it's using spinning disk drive.
I'd start with the first and strongly consider doing the second, but both should be done with the guidance of a friend who has experience with doing these types of upgrades and backing up the computer before doing them.
posted by iamabot at 8:43 PM on March 15, 2021
Anecdata, but my hard drive (HDD*) started doing exactly this a few months ago and had 100% disk activity for about two weeks. A last-ditch backup failed, though it did its best for 2 days at a pitiful 12 kb/s write speed until a computer update interrupted it. The drive was a lost cause and I replaced it with an SSD.
*Not the one with the operating system, but it had all my photos on it.
Not to worry you, but do a backup as soon as you can, just in case. And consider replacing it.
posted by lesser weasel at 10:58 PM on March 15, 2021 [2 favorites]
*Not the one with the operating system, but it had all my photos on it.
Not to worry you, but do a backup as soon as you can, just in case. And consider replacing it.
posted by lesser weasel at 10:58 PM on March 15, 2021 [2 favorites]
Yes, back up the drive asap. If you don't have enough RAM, the system uses drive space as as if it were RAM. I just ordered an SSD to upgrade my laptop; the read/write time is way faster, so that should be nice. I ordered more RAM, as well.
posted by theora55 at 6:49 AM on March 16, 2021 [2 favorites]
posted by theora55 at 6:49 AM on March 16, 2021 [2 favorites]
May be a long shot, but check your Chrome extensions - turn them all off and check their authenticity. I had a Chrome extension a while back that at some point turned into a crypto-miner and pegged my resources.
posted by homesickness at 10:14 AM on March 16, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by homesickness at 10:14 AM on March 16, 2021 [1 favorite]
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by AugustWest at 7:36 PM on March 15, 2021 [1 favorite]