My hard drive won't shut up!

  • Thread starter Thread starter itemyar
  • Start date Start date
I

itemyar

Just built a new PC and I'm using a single SATA drive (Western Digital
74gig/16meg Raptor) and it's always busy, it never seems to rest, is this
normal?

Thanks,
Ray
 
itemyar said:
Just built a new PC and I'm using a single SATA drive (Western Digital
74gig/16meg Raptor) and it's always busy, it never seems to rest, is this
normal?

Thanks,
Ray
Click to expand...

No, that's not normal. Scanned for virus activity recently? -Dave
 
It's too new to have picked up a virus, besides, I'm very well protected!
My ISP has virus protection and it always catches them before they get to
me, plus I'm behind a hardware firewall (Linksys wireless router) and Norton
just did a scan and I'm clean.
 
itemyar said:
Just built a new PC and I'm using a single SATA drive (Western Digital
74gig/16meg Raptor) and it's always busy, it never seems to rest, is this
normal?
Click to expand...
Check in the Task Manager to see if you`ve got permanent
activity going on.
 
itemyar said:
It's too new to have picked up a virus, besides, I'm very well protected!
My ISP has virus protection and it always catches them before they get to
me, plus I'm behind a hardware firewall (Linksys wireless router) and Norton
just did a scan and I'm clean.
Click to expand...
Norton System Worse? or just the antivirus?
I would dump it all.
Check to see if your office, music, or media player program is running
indexing/media sniffer software also I would get a second opinion on whether
your infected or not, be it spyware malware or trogens.........
 
itemyar said:
Just built a new PC and I'm using a single SATA drive (Western Digital
74gig/16meg Raptor) and it's always busy, it never seems to rest, is this
normal?
Click to expand...

What is the computer doing?
 
I don't know, that's the problem, I don't know what it's doing? If I do a
Ctrl/Alt/Del and look at the processes, I have no idea what should be
running and what shouldn't be?
 
itemyar said:
I don't know, that's the problem, I don't know what it's doing? If I do a
Ctrl/Alt/Del and look at the processes, I have no idea what should be
running and what shouldn't be? Snipped
Click to expand...
System idle Process as close to 99 as possible.(percent of idleness)
Most of the others round about 0 (zero).
Any others post back here.
 
itemyar said:
It's too new to have picked up a virus,
Click to expand...

that's a laugher - you can pick up a virus or anything during the
installation routine of windows if you are connected to the internet. never
assume just because it is new makes you invincible. even a new pc will last
maybe 20 minutes before picking something up off the net.

did you check for indexing like the others have told you?
 
sbb78247 said:
that's a laugher - you can pick up a virus or anything during the
installation routine of windows if you are connected to the internet.
Click to expand...

Yep, i found that out the hard way.
 
itemyar said:
Just built a new PC and I'm using a single SATA drive (Western Digital
74gig/16meg Raptor) and it's always busy, it never seems to rest, is this
normal?
Click to expand...

A small amount of background activity is perfectly normal. It could be
any number of system services, or background tasks connected with your
software complement.

A_C
 
itemyar said:
I don't know, that's the problem, I don't know what it's doing? If I do a
Ctrl/Alt/Del and look at the processes, I have no idea what should be
running and what shouldn't be?
Click to expand...

Make sure the CPU column is displayed and click on it to sort
processes in decreasing order of processor use. The processes at the
top of the list are the active ones (except for system idle). Try the
same for things like disk I/Os to see who is doing all the I/O.
 
Disable RAID. You may be backing up your backup
to the backup. Also, check that you did not read the
SATA port number wrong and you are on SATA 1.
That is my favorite blunder. If you have an IDE
device on IDE 1, remove it. Only put IDE on IDE 2
if your SATA is a boot drive. Defrag. Installs seem
to scatter all over the SATA drives. Hell of mess.
If mobo is VIA chipset, send it back for nForce4.

johns
 
Thanks, but I'm not using RAID, I have a single SATA HD plugged into SATA 1.
I think RAID is disabled by default, but I'll double check.
 
What is "indexing"? I know, I know, Google it! :-)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 
itemyar said:
It's too new to have picked up a virus, besides, I'm very well protected!
My ISP has virus protection and it always catches them before they get to
me, plus I'm behind a hardware firewall (Linksys wireless router) and
Norton just did a scan and I'm clean.
Click to expand...
Norton could be the culprit too. It came preinstalled on my new laptop and
it seemed the HDD was active all the time. Norton always seemed to be doing
something in the background. After I removed it and all traces of it in the
registry and installed AVG (my home network is behind two HW firewalls) and
just turned on the XP firewall everything was fine. I also disable indexing
on the HDD. I have not found any 'real' benefits with indexing turned on.
Open My Computer, right click on the drive, Properties and uncheck the box
for Indexing Service.

Ed
 
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