HDD always working. why?

[Battalion23]

Hi.
I have a "new" laptop , it's been over 6 months, but the hdd is new. worked great after the change, still works great, but now I notice that even without anything on , there are noises from the hard drive. I shut down all the programs... still there. I started shutting down processes in the task manager and listened for any change, nothing...
used some kind of registry cleaner... nothing, noise still there. even disabled the wifi , to verify that there's no spy progs running stuff ... noise still there. I don't mind the noise , it's not that loud, but it means something is working, and when nothing's on... I don't want the noise, I don't want the work...

 

[absynthe97]

Sysinternals has a few utilities that could help. The guy that used to run the site now works for MS so it is now an MS page.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/fileanddiskutilities.mspx

The main one would be Diskmon. There are other useful utilities there and also if you check the other categories on the left side of the page.

Diskmon will however fill up with all sorts of disk accesses. So you might have to pour through a number of things to find the process that is causing the activity. Vista for example has all sorts of background processes doing all sorts of stuff.

 

[SuperFreaky]

are you running Vista? open the new resource monitor!

 

[Midnight Rambler]

Fastfind ...

 

[Navid]

Open the task manager (Ctrl+Alt+Delete).
Select the "Processes" tab.
Under "View", click on "Select Columns".
Select "I/O Write Byts" and "I/O Read Bytes".
Click "OK".
Now, you should see which process is accessing the drive.
If none, the noise is just from the drive while it is idle!

 

[betasub]

^ Thanks to Navid for reminding me how to view those (usually hidden) process details.