Hard Drive working too hard!!!

Hello all,

My hard drive has been acting up on my 1520 for the past few days. It's working way too hard to do the simplest tasks. I've tried defragging, as well as boot section defragging, as well as virus scan and Ad-Aware scan, and nothing has turned up. I'm running on high performance, and for whatever reason, the hard drive keeps on churning like crazy. It only used to do periodic seeks before and store the info into ram, but now it's always seeking. Does anyone know a solution to this problem? I don't want to have to reformat either.

Thanks.

 

How much RAM are you using? If you've run out of RAM then the disk may be paging data back and forth and that could account for heavy hard disk usage.

 

Thanks. About 1.2 / 2GB....although, I usually only use 1.0 - 1.1, so it's a bit higher than normal. Nothing too bad though. Any other suggestions?

 

If you're running vista you might try disabling the indexing service and superfetch. Both of those will keep the hard drive busy when the computer is idle. Check out the vista optimization guide here on the forums. It ill tell you exactly what you need to do.

Remember, the less it works, the longer it will last!

 

Thanks, but I've always been running the indexing service and superfetch with no problem until now and my hard drive has been fine. Any other suggestions?

Thanks.

 

OK, we need to find out what program(s) are using the hard drive when it's working hard. To do this, go into the task manager (Control+Alt+Delete, click "Task Manager"), go to the performance tab at the top, and then click the "Resource Monitor" button on that tab. A new window will pop up. Look for the bar that says "Disk" and click the arrow on the right side of the bar. This will open up the disk monitor. You might want to maximize the resource monitor in order to see the full path to the programs in the window.

Once you're there, let me know what programs are reading/writing a lot to the hard drive when you notice that it seems to be working for no reason. Then we can determine what to do.

Good Luck!