hard drive access in vista

  • Thread starter Thread starter Esan
  • Start date Start date
E

Esan

In contrast to Windows XP, Vista seems to constitutively activate and access
the hard drive. This happens when I close games or apps. I tried
defragmenting the drive a couple of times but it's still there. Is this
because of Vista's underlying machinery, or my poor maintenance, which seems
absurd because, so far, I have two games and one app installed.
 
I think this has to do with superfetch. This can be turned off in services.
Also turn off indexing service


Ken
 
By doing this you will slow the system even more, as the purpose of those
two services is to speed up the system by caching and organizing files into
a sort of searchable metadatabase..

Esan, the activity you describe may be happening because of indexing if the
installation is new. This will eventually slow down as the system learns
your usage patterns, and the files get cataloged. It could also happen if
you have a small amount of ram, as there will be a significant amount of
paging to accomodate the memory requirements of running programs.

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP

Windows help - www.rickrogers.org
 
I'd recommend against turning it off. You could as well stay with XP.

To answer OP, yes, it's "Vista's underlying machinery". Vista tends to use
HDDs much more intensively because of number of background tasks that index
files for quick search, defragment volumes for fast access and prepare parts
of data that is used most to be available to applications just before they
need it (already mentioned SuperFetch) which significantly improves
application and overall OS responsiveness.

You may ask: "But constant disk access should slow down things significantly
since HDD is slowest memory on PC!"

Two-words answer: I/O prioritization.
This technology "helps to ensure an acceptable level of system
responsiveness to the user without significantly decreasing overall
throughput":

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/driver/priorityio.mspx

Now the only thing left that can be IMHO really annoying, especially in
media center scenarios, is HDD noise. HDDs can be very noisy depending on
model, PC case (that can act as resonator) and the way HDDs are mounted in
case. The answer to first two is obvious. As for the last one, I can
recommend something like this one from Zalman:

http://www.zalman.co.kr/eng/product/view.asp?idx=74&code=019

I'm using it for my three HDDs and I gotta tell you, it virtually eliminates
HDD noise.
 
Yes, it could still be the Indexing Engine running in the background.
 
Thanks for mentioning this Zalman product. It looks to be a good
solution to HDD noise.

Alexander Suhovey wrote:
 
Do you by any chance use FE21S?

Cos I have a very annoying Media problem of skipping music!!
 
How in the world do you get this installed in a standard bay, or does it
only fit in a 5 1/4" bay?
 
huh? and what does this have to do with vista?


LaRoux said:
How in the world do you get this installed in a standard bay, or does it
only fit in a 5 1/4" bay?
Click to expand...
 
Yes, this is for 5.25 inch bay, obviously.

IIRC there are rubber washers (and even rubber screws!) on the market for
HDDs to put in 3 inch bay but since they need to be very thin, they don't
give you as much noise reduction as mentioned product does.
 
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