Bizarre question regarding hard drive noise???

[fretman]

I have a 500gb hard drive that has 3 partitions. The first partition has XP. The second partition has Vista. And the third partition has my data.

When I boot up with XP the hard drive is nice and quiet when running. But when I boot up with Vista the drive is loud when processes are going.

Anyone care to explain this to me?

Thanks.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Vista is probably accessing your HD more. How loud/bad are these sounds? There could be bad sectors in the Vista partition too. Try running the mfg's diagnostics and do a surface scan over the whole HD.

 

[fretman]

Originally posted by: VirtualLarry
Vista is probably accessing your HD more. How loud/bad are these sounds? There could be bad sectors in the Vista partition too. Try running the mfg's diagnostics and do a surface scan over the whole HD.

I definitely believe Vista is accessing my hard drive more. However, when Vista accessess my hard drive the drive sounds twice as loud as when XP is accessing it. In XP the should is more silent and smooth. In Vista, it's louder and choppy. I did a surface scan once and reported no errors. Thanks for your feedback.

 

[Rhonda the Sly]

Probably SuperFetch. If its annoying try turning it off.

 

[faxon]

yea or you can get more RAM lol. what you are probably seeing is vista superfetching stuff you use regularly (loading it into ram), but since you arent actually using it, vista is putting it in pagefile instead, and it is making the drive spin like mad trying to keep up. how much RAM do you have?

 

[Rhonda the Sly]

What's the point in more memory? SuperFetch will simply continue to agressively cache things in and out of memory as needed. If it's too much noise too often the best solution is to turn off SuperFetch.

Edit: Assuming it is SuperFetch. If its too little memory and things getting paged out like mad... of couse, add more memory.

 

[fretman]

Originally posted by: faxon
yea or you can get more RAM lol. what you are probably seeing is vista superfetching stuff you use regularly (loading it into ram), but since you arent actually using it, vista is putting it in pagefile instead, and it is making the drive spin like mad trying to keep up. how much RAM do you have?

That makes sense. I have 4gigs of ram too.

 

[fretman]

I'll try turning off Superfetch and see what happens. Thanks to all for the help.

But I still don't know why the drive spins louder in Vista.

 

[Rhonda the Sly]

Forgot to mention the Resource Monitor. Excellent tool.