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Two hard drive questions, should be easy...?

M

markjs

Senior member
Firstly, the harder one! I am looking for an activity monitor for my hard drives. On the surface one might think it would be easy to find but it is not. What I want is, to know which programs are accessing each of my multiple drives, and when. I have Vista Business x64, and 4GB of ram on an Athlon X2, and I really am not doing anything demanding, but there are times when it sounds like it has 256 meg of RAM, running maxed out, and it happens at times that don't correspond to a heavy load, or at least I can't figure it. I use Spyware Blaster, Spybot S&D, and SUPERAntiSpyware, and I use Avira Anti Vir free to keep the machine clean, but I have never seen so much activity in my life that made less sense to me though. I am ONLY interested in free version or open source, and I would be OK if it had spyware tracking ability, but that is unimportant. What is essential to me is that it tell me exactly what processes and services are accessing the hard drive.

The second is much simpler. I have a silly little Dell mini notebook with an 8GB solid state drive. I want to upgrade to 16, and it's cheap, but honestly, what should I ask for in sale of the old one, or is there even a market for such a silly tiny thing? This one is I can search myself, but I like easy! I love BBS's like this for that reason.
 
Originally posted by: markjs
I use Spyware Blaster, Spybot S&D, and SUPERAntiSpyware, and I use Avira Anti Vir free to keep the machine clean, but I have never seen so much activity in my life that made less sense to me though.
Click to expand...
If you use the free Spyware Blaster, it does nothing to tax your system until you update it.
If you run the free SuperantiSpyware, it does nothing to tax your system until you update it and scan.
If you run the free Avira, it runs fairly lite compaired to other AV apps.
I gave up on Spybot S&D, so I couldn't tell you.

Run AutoRuns to see what's churning away on your system.

 
Thank you, that's a pretty complicated program, and not really what I was asking for, but it might be handy for some other reason when I have more time to look into it. As I said it's a deceptively difficult thing to find, that I want.

All I really want is a real time monitor of hard drive activity. I don't know enough about programming, nor do I wish to, to be able to translate all the system services and processes, and know when they should or shouldn't be accessing the hard drive.

When I hear that thing grinding away furiously for 10 minutes straight, while I am typing into text boxes on my browser, and nothing else, I want to know why. It may just be that my Seagate drives are louder than any I have had before, but I doubt that's it. I am sure such a program exists, but other than asking on forums I don't know how to find it, and I have tried. But thanks anyway, I know it can be hard to understand what a person is asking for, and I do appreciate effort, even if it is not the answer.
 
The 8GB drives don't sell super well from the Mini 9's. I ordered both of mine (one is a gift for my father) with 4GB and am using the cheap Supertalent 16GB drives.

Personally, faced with a choice of getting $15-20 for the 8GB drive versus having a spare drive with a different OS. I just kept the 4GB ones for Linux distro testing.
 
i also gave up on spybot search and destroy... it caused too much damage too many times...

I don't know of any program that can actively monitor the HDD access, AFAIK only the OS kernel can do that, and the windows OS kernel is a black box that is not gonna surrender its secrets easily... it might be possible with the new vista api for anti virus programs (to prevent them from patching the kernel, allow them to intercept drive access). However that still does not see anything initiated by the kernel, rootkits,etc... so if there is something "odd" going on it will not find it. but it will tell you if a program you know of is doing something...

Try disabling superfetch and see if tat helps
 
Yup, Superfetch or possibly also indexing or defragging.

Vista does all this on its own, & i strongly advise letting Vista do its thing.
 
I have similar issues too, right after my vista x64 boots up I have to wait a minute or two (disk activity is really high but drops after a minute or two) before I can open anything or else its just horribly UNRESPONSIVE on my WD 6400aaks. Probably a fast storage array such as the intel x25-m or a pair of ocz vertex drives in raid 0 will prevent such sluggishness but they are still far out of my budget right now.
 
Unfortunately, i don't think your issue is the same TC91, as we've discussed before.

I run Vista on an old 500 GB Maxtor (my Lian LAN), not to mention a 4200 RPM notebook drive without the issues you describe right after bootup...
 
fyi, vista has a built in resource monitor that tells you what is accessing the hard drive. you can get to it from the task manager's performance tab. the information there isn't the easiest to decipher though
 
Originally posted by: n7
Yup, Superfetch or possibly also indexing or defragging.

Vista does all this on its own, & i strongly advise letting Vista do its thing.
Click to expand...

ditto. Those things are GOOD for you to let run.
 
Vista has scheduled defrags set up automatically. If your computer is off or you're using it when it is scheduled to go off, then Vista will delay it and run it when it can. It will continue to do this until it has caught up, and is able to run it at the regularly scheduled time.

Straight from the horse's mouth.
 
Originally posted by: vshah
fyi, vista has a built in resource monitor that tells you what is accessing the hard drive. you can get to it from the task manager's performance tab. the information there isn't the easiest to decipher though
Click to expand...

It's not the most informative tool, but it can be helpful. :thumbsup:
 
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