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  1. #1
    Relic Weapons
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    Non-stop HDD activity

    For the past 3 days my HDD has been constantly clicking away in the background, even with no programs running, right from startup. Its causing slowdowns when I run programs, especially when first starting them up, but also occasional spikes during use. According to Task Manager, the CPU is barely being used and only ~30% of memory is being used, but disk activity is very high. Any program running will rack up huge i/o reads and/or writes - after an hour or so, firefox.exe has racked up over a gig of i/o write bytes.

    I first tried a system restore to a few days before I noticed any problem, with no effect. I've used windows to run memory and disk checks; no problems come up (disk check had to be run on startup due to 'drive in use' always coming up within windows). The hard drive is only ~1/4 full, and has regular defrags scheduled. I've disabled parts of McAfee with no effect, so its likely not my antivirus (combined with pretty safe internet use, I doubt its a virus either). I've done some googling, but haven't found an easy solution. My next steps are 1) complete re-install, then 2) buy a new hard drive and migrate everything over. Before I do those, I was hoping someone might have an educated guess which would be more likely to succeed, or anything else to try.

    Computer: almost 4 years old, Dell PC w/ Intel i7, 8GB ram. Whatever relevant info I can provide, let me know.

  2. #2
    Hyperion Cross
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    Windows Vista or 7?

    Is it fine if you disable all of Mcafee? (I've come across terrible disk r/w with McAfee)

    Is Indexing on?

    Try to disable Automatic (Windows) Updates, that's a common culprit.

    Boot up in Safe Mode also and monitor to see if it has the same effect.

    What happens if you leave your PC idle for a while?

    If fine in Safe Mode, boot up normally and slowly kill all none essential tasks until you're running on bare minimum to see if it still occurs.

  3. #3

    Sweaty Dick Punching Enthusiast

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    Quote Originally Posted by Avinor View Post
    firefox.exe has racked up over a gig of i/o write bytes.
    Firefox seems to be a natural major resource hog. It's never under 500mb on any system I've run it on. It's 316mb right now and raising. However, no other process(except 1 svchost.exe) gets over 50mb.

    In the meantime while following what The Stig has said, you should close it out when you need your ram for other things.

  4. #4
    Relic Weapons
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    OS is Windows 7. Leaving it idle doesn't seem to help, unless it goes into sleep mode of course. Tried booting in safe mode with no effect, the disk was still clicking away rapdily. Task/Resource managers displayed similar readouts, lots of disk activity with very little cpu/memory use. Just restarting lagged a bit. I'm planning on trying a new HDD, hoping its a hardware problem there and that solves it; even if it doesn't I may still want a new one after all the activity on my current one the past few days.

  5. #5
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    Update: installed a new hard drive and just cloned my existing one, then disconnected it. So far everything is running nice and smooth again, so it appears to be just a sickly older HDD. Thanks for the advice and suggestions; I was hoping for a software solution, but I'm just happy to have a solution.

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