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Constant disk access


Swimming_Bird

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It seems like vista goes though these spurts where it's CONSTATNLY accessing the disk.

Since i'm running 2x raptors in raid it gets extremly noisy. Sometimes its the Search Indexer (which i cant kill no matter what i do) sometimes its just svchost. but it's rediculous. i have no idea what it's trying to do but i'm just browsing hte web.

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Try Process Monitor, to see if it's a particular file that it's trying to access. How much physical RAM do you have, and what version of Vista are you running? BTW, I've had this problem before on some of my machines as well, and it was being caused by (of all things) the Realtek HD audio driver. Just a thought.

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Sometimes, for some reason, don't know why, some drivers can do this. Something else too is indexing and defrag, Vista tries to run these when it thinks the machine is idle.

One of the partial solutions for the indexing is to let Vista completly index everything, or exclude certain drives from indexing (not recommended for the Vista install drive). Go in and tell it to index and then just wait until its finished. The follow on indexing spurts will be shorter in duration and much less frequent, unless you do a lot of changes with adding, moving, and removing stuff. And...yes there is a way to turn indexing off.

The defrag part, well...you can turn it off. Personally I don't turn it off but some people do.

Another thing too ....how much memory you have...and...do you have anything running in the background?

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I'm guessing all of the file accesses will be via searchindexer.exe or system accesses to the pagefile - the former means the index is likely too large to fit into available RAM (and gets swapped out - very bad for the indexer :)), or system accesses to the pagefile means driver issue.

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  • 1 month later...

This is still infuriating, i'm positive I have enough RAM that thing sre not being passed into the pagefile.

It is indeed the search indexer causing the problems, but svchost.exe (LocalServiceNetworkRestricted) also has lots of access.

I dont get why the google desktop indexer is so much better then one made by microsoft.

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Funny that I run across this as I have the same issue. My system is setup with:

Vista Ultimate 32bit

2 Raptors X Drives in raid0

4GB of Corsair Ram

It's a new install but I notice the same crap, hard drives just running crazy when system is idle. I'll take a look at that Process Monitor and look at the other things mentioned.

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this is not the pagefile, it's the stupid volume shadow copy service. Nobody knows how to stop this behavior. sure, you can disable the service, but then system restore won't work.

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  • 1 year later...

I HAVE FOUND THE ACTUAL CAUSE! I am positive this is what has been causing the intense disk activity on my IBM laptop with Vista Business with SP1 and on my desktop with Vista Home Premium with SP1. It is task scheduler but more specifically it is System Restore. Go to your start meu, all programs, accessories, system tools, and then task scheduler. In task scheduler drop down task scheduler library, microsoft, windows, system restore. Now from here check the "triggers". It is scheduled to run on every system startup and every day at 12:00 am. Then check "conditions" and you'll see task scheduler will queue the system restore task on these triggers to run once the computer has been idle for 10 minutes. This is the cause, it's your choice how you want to change this from happening. You can turn system restore off, you can just delete this task completely and run system restore manually, or (I haven't tried this yet though so I don't know how well this will work but) within the task if you double click on the task "SR" you will get a new window, go to conditions, and under where it says "Start the task only if the computer is idle for:" there is a check box that says "Stop if the computer ceases to be idle". Check this box and the hard drive activity should stop if you start working on your computer again. Or you can just delete one of the triggers or you can change the idle time to longer than 10 minutes. Please post and let me know if that fixes your excessive hard drive access issue.

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HI,

Craigan89 I think you found the problem!

I just did what you said and change my tasks to disabled the startup option and modify my idle tiem to 1 hour. I've also rescheduled the task to my lunch break, wich is at 11:30 instead of 12:00.

That anoying disk activity is gone!

Thanks a lot!

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