Hard Drive is non stop acting

[tigersty1e]

I just installed Vista Home Premium and it takes a good 5-10 minutes before my hard drive light stops blinking and the hard drive stops working.

Is this normal?

This hard drive is new and this is my first experience with Vista, so I'm not sure what to expect.


BTW, my specs in the rig plus a Gigabyte P35 DS3L and a 500 gig Seagate drive
http://forums.anandtech.com/me...id=40&threadid=2098200

 

[boglwe]

Its the indexing function of Vista, you can turn it off though in control panel. If you turn it off, then when you search for things, its like the way XP used to do it. If you keep it on, search works like OSX does it. BUt, its really mean to your hard drives. I never search for things on my comp, I know where they are. but, its up to you.

 

[tigersty1e]

I also know where everything is.

Is this some sort of defragging?

I game on my machine so any decrease in load times, etc. helps me. I don't want to shorten the life span on my hard drive to make searching easier if that's all it does.

 

[Noema]

It's indexing but it won't last forever; as soon as it is done indexing everything in your HDD it should stop...it should take a fresh install of Vista several hours for it to finish though, depending on how much data you've got in there.

And even if you know where everything is, I suggest you keep it on, specially because you can instant-search stuff inside files (like words within a text document, or the metadata of an MP3). Like I said, the HDD thrashing should stop as soon as it is done indexing, and any new files will be automatically indexed.

And don't worry about it shortening the life span on your HDD. AFAIK it's all low-priority I/O so it shouldn't affect performance that much when it's running.

Also remember Vista has to load the Superfetch cache everytime you boot-up, and that also takes a good minute or two. Again, it should stop once it is done. And it's also low priority I/O.

 

[nerp]

Hibernate instead of fully powering off.

 

[postmortemIA]

lots of RAM means superfetch has to load it all from the hard drive, essentially it isd gonna read ~4GB every time you boot up, plus the indexing as mentioned

 

[Griffinhart]

As mentioned, your HD will be pretty busy after a fresh install of Vista. Give it a week or so, depending on use, for it to settle down. It's doing a number of things to self tune your system. Once the install is fully established HD activity drops to XP levels.

 

[nerp]

Also, don't worry about your HD dying. If they were that fragile, we'd see a lot more failing drives because of everyday use. Google recently released results of an internal study that concluded there is no real difference between a drive that is heavily thrashed and a drive that is babied in terms of failure rates. Google makes use of lots of normal servers and off the shelf drives and it appears that if a drive is going to fail, it will fail regardless of the usage patterns. We take for granted that our laptop LCD's lamp is going to run all day nonstop, not to mention our CPUs are constantly being powered by electricity. We drive our cars for 6 hours nonstop in 100 degree desert heat, etc. Things are designed to take a beating and as long as you're not dropping hard drives down flights of stairs or shaking them violently like a child playing christmas present detective on xmas eve, you'll be fine. The last thing you really should be worrying about is Vista killing your hard drive.

 

[marks70]

I'm experiencing the exact same problem. I just purchased a laptop with Vista Premium on it and 2 gigs of RAM, and I've been using it for close to 4 days . I've disabled indexing, but for about 10 minutes after the laptop boots up it is thrashing away on my hard drive. I've had two other computers briefly with Vista on them, and they exhibited the exact same problem.

If its not the Indexing service, what else could it be? Its driving me nuts not being able to figure out what is causing it.