Source of my HDD noise.

my hdd started to get really noisy, so i decided to open up my resource monitor and noticed my hdd kept running svchost.exe. what is that exactly? is there anything i could do about it?

 

This is a basic windows process. The first thing I would try would be to run antivirus + antispyware scan

 

i've run the anti-virus and it's clean. what free spyware scanner would you recommend?

 

spybot is not bad

 

I suggest you to scan with both Ad-aware 2007 and Spybot S&D (you've done antivirus scan but don't neglect the spyware scan)

Scanning with two programs gives better results because they don't always find the same kind of spyware and sometimes one program says that spyware ABC has been removed while the other find that some files/registry keys are still present

 

it's noisy probably because the hard drive is performing some reading/writing activity. for example, when i run my antivirus/spyware scan, it gets pretty noisy. svchost is a windows process, mainly internet, etc. i believe. it might be a virus, what kind of antivirus prog u got?

 

Avira Anti Virus. I also have the mcafee security center that came with my Dell.

 

I hope you don't have both antivirus running real time protection simultaneously?

 

yup, i have kaspersky, and when it is on the hard drive works like crazy

 

nope, i only have Avira on at the moment. my hdd has been loud the past week. compared to my bro's Acer 5920 which is so silent. i've scanned my hdd with both Ad-Aware and Spybot, and got rid of some minor files, in the end it's still noisy and super active. light keeps blinking and you can hear the hdd accessing or reading constantly.

 

would you recommend i re-install my mcafee and get rid of avira?

 

I'd recommend you uninstall both, restart and install only one of them.

 

Why don't you run Process Explorer and see what service is running inside of the service host process? Then you can make an informed decision as to what you should be doing about it...

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/utilities/processexplorer.mspx

 

Is your computer brand new?

 

i've had it for about a month and a half.

 

What kind of noise is it? Maybe you're suffering from the same problem that plagued a lot of people. Check out my sig for a solution.

 

My guess is that the OS is updating the [file] indicies* for faster searches.

You can verify this by turning off indexing on all logical drives and then monitor your HDD activity. If that was the cuplrit, you can then decide what's more important to you, faster searches, or less HDD activity.

Last but not least, I think that in the power managment module (at least w/ VISTA), you can choose the level of Inexing performance for both batt. & AC (mains) modes.

*Open up Windows Explorer, right-click each logical drive, un-check "Allow Inexing Service ot index this disk..."

 

Yes, it's worth checking for indexing...but I don't think it's the problem if the computer has been running for 1½ month

 

Do you have Vista?