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Constant Hard Drive Write Access

Discussion in 'Techno-Magic' started by Taluntain, Dec 8, 2006.

  1. Taluntain

    Taluntain Resident Alpha and Omega Staff Member ★ SPS Account Holder Resourceful Adored Veteran Pillars of Eternity SP Immortalizer (for helping immortalize Sorcerer's Place in the game!) New Server Contributor [2012] (for helping Sorcerer's Place lease a new, more powerful server!) Torment: Tides of Numenera SP Immortalizer (for helping immortalize Sorcerer's Place in the game!) BoM XenForo Migration Contributor [2015] (for helping support the migration to new forum software!)

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    [​IMG] So, I've finally transferred everything from my old computer to this new one. Everything's running great, but one thing is driving me crazy... some blasted thing is causing constant writing to the hard drive. Even when I'm not doing anything and the activity should be 0, every few seconds the HDD activity indicators flash and I can hear the drive writing something.

    I've spent more than two hours trying to get to the bottom of it to no avail. I've tried shutting down processes via elimination, and I did manage to stop the constant accessing a few times... the problem is, it never happened after killing the same process. :bad:

    I've tried running only in safe mode, and it even happens there (though less frequently). I've tried pulling the plug on the network, and it made no difference.

    I've tried turning off drive indexing for the OS partition; no difference.

    I've downloaded DiskMon and can see constant disk activity even after killing pretty much all the processes, but that's not really any help since this utility doesn't help tracking down what's causing the writing (only that it happens, which I obviously already know).

    If someone has any ideas what to try next, or knows of a program that would help me track down what's causing the incessant drive writing, I'd appreciate it.

    Btw, I have an nForce motherboard (K9N Neo by MSI) and Windows XP SP2 installed.
     
    Taluntain, Dec 8, 2006
    #1
  2. Taza

    Taza Weird Modmaker Veteran

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    It sounds like some antivirus / system automatic scan/backup/index feature. Like Google Desktop, Drive Indexing on any drive, a background scanner or a Windows XP feature.

    You turned off drive indexing just for the system partition?
     
    Taza, Dec 8, 2006
    #2
  3. Taluntain

    Taluntain Resident Alpha and Omega Staff Member ★ SPS Account Holder Resourceful Adored Veteran Pillars of Eternity SP Immortalizer (for helping immortalize Sorcerer's Place in the game!) New Server Contributor [2012] (for helping Sorcerer's Place lease a new, more powerful server!) Torment: Tides of Numenera SP Immortalizer (for helping immortalize Sorcerer's Place in the game!) BoM XenForo Migration Contributor [2015] (for helping support the migration to new forum software!)

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    I don't have any antivirus software installed yet, so that can't be it. No Google desktop either.

    I've turned drive indexing off just for the system partition, but I guess I should have tried turning it off for all of them. Unfortunately the procedure apparently involves the OS setting no-index attributes on every single file. Even for my small OS partition it took a long time... doing it for the other two big partitions will take ages, and I can only pray something doesn't go wrong in the middle of the process.

    I'd rather not even attempt it unless I was sure that this is what's causing this constant writing. But I'd need some utility to be able to figure it out first. :bad:
     
    Taluntain, Dec 9, 2006
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  4. Chas Gems: 14/31
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    Just some ideas. Do you have system restore turned on? It might be taking initial snapshots of all the drives. If you have auto updates turned on, it might be searching everything to see if an update is needed. Is your virtual memory spread out over all drives? It could be trying to set them all up.
     
    Chas, Dec 9, 2006
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  5. Taluntain

    Taluntain Resident Alpha and Omega Staff Member ★ SPS Account Holder Resourceful Adored Veteran Pillars of Eternity SP Immortalizer (for helping immortalize Sorcerer's Place in the game!) New Server Contributor [2012] (for helping Sorcerer's Place lease a new, more powerful server!) Torment: Tides of Numenera SP Immortalizer (for helping immortalize Sorcerer's Place in the game!) BoM XenForo Migration Contributor [2015] (for helping support the migration to new forum software!)

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    System restore is on, but it's not something that'd write to the drive constantly, so this can't be it. I've had it on on previous OS installs and it never wrote to the drive all the time. Could be that it's just an initial thing, as you wrote, but I don't know...

    Auto updates are off. As for virtual memory, I have no idea really. How can I check?
     
    Taluntain, Dec 10, 2006
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  6. Yulaw9460 Gems: 9/31
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    Controlpanel->System->Anvanced-> Performance Settings-> Advanced, IIRC. My system is in Danish, so the names of the menus might be different on yours. Under the Advanced menu you can access the settings for virtual memory for all drives, partitions etc. However, in this menu you can only check how much virtual memory your computer has allocated, not if it IS actually using it in the cycles you describe. But if you set it to 0 and the problem persists, it may not be a problem with virtual memory. And again, I haven´t much of a clue as to how the computer will react to having 0 virtual memory allocated. So maybe I´m not presenting much of a solution here.
     
    Yulaw9460, Dec 10, 2006
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  7. Kitrax

    Kitrax Pantaloons are supposed to go where!?!?

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    That's the first thing that poped in to my head. Your virtual memory might be causing the problem. If you can, limit the size of how much you use.

    Right click "My Computer" > Prperties > Advanced > Click "settings" under the Performance section > Advanced. The Virtual memory section should be on the bottom of the new dialog box that pops up. If you have enough real RAM, you can try disableing the paging file.

    There's several possible causes actually. Chas mentioned a good posibility... Give it some time, it might just stop in a little while. :rolling:
     
    Kitrax, Dec 10, 2006
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  8. Taluntain

    Taluntain Resident Alpha and Omega Staff Member ★ SPS Account Holder Resourceful Adored Veteran Pillars of Eternity SP Immortalizer (for helping immortalize Sorcerer's Place in the game!) New Server Contributor [2012] (for helping Sorcerer's Place lease a new, more powerful server!) Torment: Tides of Numenera SP Immortalizer (for helping immortalize Sorcerer's Place in the game!) BoM XenForo Migration Contributor [2015] (for helping support the migration to new forum software!)

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    I've tried turning off virtual memory completely, but the writing persisted, so this is not it either. *sigh*
     
    Taluntain, Dec 12, 2006
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  9. Colthrun

    Colthrun Walk first in the forest and last in the bog Veteran

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    Did you check how often the Index Service is being used?

    Right-click MyComputer -> Manage -> Services and Applications -> Right Click on Index Service -> All Tasks -> Tune Performance

    You could try turning it off altogether.
     
    Colthrun, Dec 13, 2006
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  10. Xavos Infuty Gems: 1/31
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    Maybe it's some kind of prefetch problem? Windows XP might be writing to prefetch.
     
    Xavos Infuty, Dec 14, 2006
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  11. Sydax Gems: 19/31
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    Bingo! Finally I found someone having the same thing as me! :lol:
    I've searched on google and everywhere with no luck, I can even hear the darng disk writing when I'm sleeping and I'm 5mts away!.
    I tried everything that's been said here with no luck. I even formated, installed step by step: Windows only, with no internet connection, with no indexing and lots of other stuff still writes to disk every 2 - 5 seconds. So there wasn't any other stuff installed to catch the writer.
    I've noticed another thing: while on the Windows explorer, I can see it acting like is refreshing every 5 - 8 seconds.
    Really. Spooky stuff.

    [ December 15, 2006, 11:14: Message edited by: Sydax ]
     
    Sydax, Dec 14, 2006
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  12. Chas Gems: 14/31
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    Just an idea. I have no idea if this would help or not. New drives have a S.M.A.R.T. technology:
    http://www.harddriverecovery.org/smart_detection.html

    In your bios, you can enable or disable this feature. You can try disabling it if it is enabled. I have never tried turning on this feature even though I think my new drives can do it. So I don't know what affect it has on performance.
     
    Chas, Dec 15, 2006
    #12
  13. Taluntain

    Taluntain Resident Alpha and Omega Staff Member ★ SPS Account Holder Resourceful Adored Veteran Pillars of Eternity SP Immortalizer (for helping immortalize Sorcerer's Place in the game!) New Server Contributor [2012] (for helping Sorcerer's Place lease a new, more powerful server!) Torment: Tides of Numenera SP Immortalizer (for helping immortalize Sorcerer's Place in the game!) BoM XenForo Migration Contributor [2015] (for helping support the migration to new forum software!)

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    Ok, tried all of the above, no difference whatsoever. I'm starting to give up... However, I just remembered that I installed some Nvidia HDD drivers along with the ethernet ones, but as I recall, those were only for RAID... I'm not sure though. I guess uninstalling all Nvidia drivers is another thing I can try in case it's Nvidia drivers that are causing this (as I mentioned above, I have an nForce motherboard).
     
    Taluntain, Dec 26, 2006
    #13
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