Disk write, HDD activity

[Guest]

I have noticed that HDD led on XPe computer is flashing. When investigating
further with HDD activity monitoring tool i can see that XPe is doing small
writes each 5sec or so. Is this normal? I am thinking that it is not good for
the disk.
I can not find what is causing the writes. Running filemon and regmon shows
no file or registry activity.

Maybe it would be smart to use EWF?

regards
Oyvind Hansen

 

[Sean Liming \(eMVP\)]

XP/XPe is constantly reading/writing to the disk. This is why EWF and FBWF
are suggested to extend the life of some flash disks.

One thing you might want to turn is is Background Disk Defragmentation by
adding the Background Disk Defragmentation Disable component.

Regards,

Sean Liming
www.sjjmicro.com / www.seanliming.com
XP Embedded Book Author - XP Embedded Advanced, XP Embedded Supplemental
Toolkit
XP Training Class Nov 28-30 - http://www.sjjmicro.com/Training.html

 

[KM]

Oyvind,

Also, you may want to disable things like Index service, if present, and disable write caching on the hard drive.

When you monitoring HDD activities you may want to use DiskMon instead of FileMon. That would be more appropriate tool for that.

 

[Guest]

I can understand why Disabling Index Service will reduce activity. But I
thought that disk cache was to buffer up data for writing, and that disabling
write cache will increase write activity?

I am familiar with diskmon but it will not run on my image.

Background disk defragmentation disable is not included in my image, but
when looking at disk properties on target it seemes like that disk
defragmentation is off.

The disk activity i am seeing is maybe not a problem, but since my
application don't require very limited disk writes/reads it would be great to
switch off the drive when no disk access from my application. I believe that
the disk then will last longer.

regards
oyvind

 

[KM]

Oyvind,

The point to disable the disk write cache was to make it more deterministic so that you know what in the system and when is trying
to write to the disk.

Not sure I understand what you mean by "switch off the drive".

Btw, why Diskmon cannot be run on your image? Dependency issue? Diskmon is pretty simple app (disk level filter driver + very basic
GUI) and typically doesn't require much from the image to support.