how to know what the hell your hard drive is doing??

[Vesper8]

Hi all.

I'm running Vista Ultimate, and every now and then I hear my hard drive grinding (sort of like if it was defragging). It's constant and it lasts a long time.. usually over half an hour!

There's no reason it should be doing this.. everything is idle.. my antivirus isn't scanning.. and i've disabled the in-vista defragging. If I look at the task manager there aren't any out-of-the-ordinary processes that are using up CPU.. so I have no idea what it's doing

Is there an application out there, or another means, that could help me pinpoint what the hell is with all the HD activity?

thanks all

 

[Agentbolt]

Vista has a performance monitor that shows exactly what you're looking for. I believe it's called Performance Monitor, the HDD section is in between CPU and Memory usage. It's in the performance and maintenance area of the control panel but I can't remember exactly where.

Someone smarter than me will be posting shortly to tell you exactly what I'm talking about, I'm sure.

 

[zephyrprime]

That area doesn't really show a lot of the system services which is what I find is usually behind this stuff.

If I had to guess, I would say it's the indexing service.

There's some sort of file monitor you can download from MS to see what's going on. When you use it, you have to select a certain option in the menu to show system activities.

 

[jameswhite1979]

Task manager you can add columns: View > Select Columns.