who is accessing HDD and why

[JohnMirror]

I use Windows 7 x86 for quite some time.

I noticed one thing: sometimes is just starting to access the HDD for minutes, slowing down other disk operations.

It's not a virus. It's not a hardware problem.

I deactivated Restore, Superfetch, Indexing, Windows defender (the scheduled scan) and Scheduled defragmentation.

I installed clean, without other programs.

Still no change...

On the same computer I have another partition with Windows XP x86. Each primary partition is hidden when the computer is booting from the other one.

In Windows XP I don't have this problem, even with installed programs.

I saw it happening on other computers too. In Vista is worst...

Does anybody has an idea which service/process from Windows 7 is doing this, why and how to stop it (safely)...?

[CoffeeFiend]

I haven't seen that kind of problem on any computer so far, and I don't go disabling services like that either. Try running the performance monitor (search for it in the start menu, or run %windir%\system32\perfmon.exe /res directly). Go to the disk tab, and see which process is hitting the disk so hard. You could also do this using performance counters.

[allen2]

Or you could try with procmon.

[JohnMirror]

Thank you.

Ok, but what should I look for? Faster read, faster write or something else..?

2 screenshots:

Edited March 19, 2011 by JohnMirror

[jaclaz]

Wouldn't Task Manager (once enabled the I/O and Byte read/write columns) be simpler?

jaclaz

[JohnMirror]

Ok, Task Manager

[cluberti]

As long as you don't need to know files or file types, yes, task manager is easier. Resmon is good if you need a bit more detail, and if you need process and file / registry information, you use procmon.