Reducing amount of hard disk activity

[hougtimo]

Hi,

I am trying to reduce the amount of hard drive activity I have while running windows. I have found that nLiting helps a lot, but I still get a lot of hard drive noise

I have no page file, so it isnt paging anything, and sometimes i get random bursts when the computer is idling, doing nothing. I have all unnessesary services disabled (running on 7) and I regularly clean out all junk files and cleanout and defrag my registry. I also have a completely defragged hard drive - In total i have used 978mb with windows and all my programs, so it is fairly slim too.

Does anybody have any ideas on how to reduce the amount of hard drive activity?

Thanks

HougTimo

[RJM]

If your hard drive is formated with NTFS, this could be one of the "features" of NTFS.

"The two most fabulous and welcome features of NTFS are, without a doubt, transaction logging & security. Transaction logging, among other things, offers a much needed degree of data recovery. As it stands now, our metadata friend known as $LOGFILE is written to every several seconds, hence monitoring recent changes to the directory structure and files. These transactional records are recorded as actions that either need to be undone or redone, pending a system failure. This kind of "roll-forward" and "roll-back" preservation serves to eliminate any loss of data in the event of the blue whammy screen of pain (you know, just in case). "

Edited May 17, 2006 by RJM

[trickytwista]

yep that makes sense

[Ghost_Shield]

Hello,

I thought is was highly recommended to run with at least some page file... but anyway

A couple of things that I would check are:

Is there any bad sectors on the Hard drive

Spyware and virii are a pain double check them too

Is this a fresh install of windows? If not reinstall and see if you still have the same problem.

Hope this helps

Ghost Shield

[cluberti]

Have you run filemon on your system (from http://www.sysinternals.com) to see what is causing the activity? Usually this type of disk activity is caused by antivirus, for reference - for every one disk read or write, you get at least 4 or 5 passes on that I/O from the Antivirus (sometimes more, depending on the vendor). This might not seem like a lot, but fire up filemon sometime and just watch your A/V at work .

[hougtimo]

It is a brand new install and there is no AV / firewall running in the BG. The hard drive is also brand new, with no bad sectors etc... so everything is looking good ... looks like im gonna have to put up with the activity.

[alsiladka]

I think that it must be due to NTFS. Your disk is formatted with NTFS i guess?

As it is , some data activity is bound to be happenning every now and then. Disk Optimization when idle , Indexing? , Logging ......

[mhc]

I know it's blasphemous in many circles, but if you want to rid yourself of most (and on my system, ALL) of the hard disk thrashing when your system is idle, disable the Windows Management Instrumentation service. I've had mine off for more than a year, and it would appear that those who say the service is vital or required on all systems have never turned it off for any length of time to check for themselves!

You won't break your system if you disable WMI, so give it a try. If you find that something doesn't work quite right (doubtful, but certainly possible), you can always re-enable the service.

Mark

[cluberti]

Unless you're actually using WMI to gather data about the machine, or to perform functions like application installation and management (SMS), you do not need it running in a home-user environment.

[LLXX]

There's also the EWF (Enhanced Write Filter) that you can get by downloading the Windows XP Embedded Edition from Microsoft (free download). It is specifically designed to reduce writes to flash-based disks, which are much more sensitive to write cycles than ordinary hard drives.

[cluberti]

I'd still say that using filemon in this case is the best way to determine what process(es) seem to be actually writing or reading from disk, and then the determination can be made from there how to minimize or eliminate it (great suggestions all, by the way ).