Why is hard drive always running

Posted 28 April - AM Check in your scheduled tasks for anything set to run. Maybe a virus scan or similar. Posted 28 April - AM Does not seem to be a virus. I have Norton Antivirus, and nothing was detected. Select the Processes tab. Clicking on the column header is like flipping a toggle switch; each time you click, the sort display order is reversed based on the values in that column highest to lowest, or lowest to highest.

Posted 28 April - PM 1. Install and run TweakUI. In the TweakUI select General then in the right-hand-side list scroll down and un-check Optimize hard disk when idle 3.

Restart computer for changes to take effect. You can always defrag your hard disk when needed like once in a month etc. Edited by Romeo29, 28 April - PM. Posted 28 April - PM M I attached a screenshot. Attached Files Picture1. After restarting, no change in hard drive activity. They agreed that their services were consuming high amount of resources, and they accessed my PC to help to assess this and reduced resource usage to a normal level. But, even after that my hard disk is still running non-stop.

Symmantec tells me it is not their software causing this. Still the hard drive has non-stop activity I hear the sounds from it. Screen shot is attached.

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Current visitors New profile posts Search profile posts Billboard Trophies. Thread starter pcbuilder Start date Sep 1, Forums Hardware Storage. JavaScript is disabled. For a better experience, please enable JavaScript in your browser before proceeding. Previous Next Sort by votes. Sep 1, 2 0 1, 0. Task manager shows that "system and compressed memory" is what is running so high.

The problem will last about 15 minutes, remain ok for less than 5 minutes, and then continue on. As you can imagine while this is happening everything I try to do on the PC is extremely slow because of this.

I have run multiple antiviruses to see if it was possibly a virus but have had no luck. I am running Windows 10 if that helps. Any ideas would be great. Jul 31, 6, 2 35, 2, Hey there. If it's not a virus it could be some sort of issue with the drive, or a different kind of software problem, perhaps an OS one. First, you should backup your important data if you haven't done it already, just to be on the safe side. After that I'd advise you to download the HDD manufacturer's diagnostic tool and run the tests so that you can either confirm or rule out a possible issue with the HDD.

You could also give it a go with a different SATA port and different cables, to see if the same thing happens. The list auto updates every second by default it can be changed from 0. Download Process Hacker. You can find here github. I was looking for something to tell me what process was accessing my network drives, not the local hard drive.

So my issue was a little different than what is discussed here, but it turned out that Process Monitor worked great for this.

I was able to set up a filter that only showed accesses to the network drives and I very quickly found out exactly what I was looking for. I was able to remove the program that was touching the drives every 20 seconds or so and preventing the drives from going to sleep. Thanks for this very informative article! Problem is most of those programs actually log their activities causing unnecessary writes to the disk as well.

I finally switched OS and rarely see a disk access. But for those who are less adventurous. One way to solve some of the access problems is to disable logging and auditing unless your system has crashed recently.

And set your defrag and updates to something like once a week or once a month and turn off all the process and performance tracing utilities unless you are debugging or developing. I actually thought that the hard drive indicator light was there to tell me that the drive was ready.

Partially because it is not quite as user friendly as windows eg. Nevertheless the tools you mentioned are great for finding out which programs are doing all of the reading and writing. The most annoying one is finding out that system or syshost or spp. Because that means that you have enabled some sort of background task that has lots of dependencies and keeps lots of unnecessary files open. Setting logging to crash dumps and system errors only and either turning indexing off or setting it to only index media and documents will definitely help and the tools you have listed are pretty awesome for getting right to the core issues.

But for me being a developer and having my computer crash and constantly in debug mode Windows just ran non-stop trying to see if I was breeching their EULA and constantly wanting internet access or to log everything to send to Microsoft every time I got online my disk was constantly whirring. Sweet little tool. I love seeing the file activity.

No more mysterious HD thrashing by covert corporate and Microsoft updateware.