What is going on with my hard drives?!?!?!

  • Thread starter Thread starter Steven Davidson
  • Start date Start date
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Steven Davidson

I recently installed Vista and I'm noticing something that I can't seem to
remember from XP. My hard drives are going crazy with activity at times
during which there really shouldn't be any activity at all. I happen to have
4 Raptors in a RAID0+1 configuration and they sure are noisy when they start
thrashing. I have 8 GB of RAM on the system so it shouldn't be the swap
file. However, it seems like 25% of the time, my hard drives are going
breserk with activity. Is there a tool which will allow me to break down
disk activity by process?
 
Task Manager (Ctrl + Shift + Escape). Add I/O to the columns (View - Select
Columns) on the Process tab.
 
If you just installed Vista, it's probably creating the index.
Click to expand...

Shut off indexing, you don't need it. Be sure to disable the process.
Install Agent Ransack for searching.
 
Steven Davidson said:
I recently installed Vista and I'm noticing something that I can't seem to
remember from XP. My hard drives are going crazy with activity at times
during which there really shouldn't be any activity at all. I happen to
have
4 Raptors in a RAID0+1 configuration and they sure are noisy when they
start
thrashing. I have 8 GB of RAM on the system so it shouldn't be the swap
file. However, it seems like 25% of the time, my hard drives are going
breserk with activity. Is there a tool which will allow me to break down
disk activity by process?
Click to expand...

Process Monitor will show all file and registry activity in real time.
It displays a lot of data very quickly. It usually records about
a thousand or more lines of data per second, but allows you to
grab and scroll backwards through the data.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896645.aspx
 
+Bob+ said:
Shut off indexing, you don't need it. Be sure to disable the process.
Install Agent Ransack for searching.
Click to expand...

Don't shut off indexing. It will soon be complete. It makes for quick work
when searching for files on your computer.
 
Charles W Davis said:
Don't shut off indexing. It will soon be complete. It makes for quick work
when searching for files on your computer.
Click to expand...

Agent Ransack doesn't use the index.

Vista's search is freaking horrible.
 
I think I got to the bottom of the thrashing issue. It's the SuperFetch
service. Apparently it preloads data into RAM based on past application use
patterns. Since I have 8 GB of RAM, it probably loads a ton of data (like
"World of Warcraft", perhaps) every time I restart the system.
 
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