Constant Disk Use in Windows Vista?
 

Have recently installed a new copy of Windows Vista Home Premium 32bit on 1 30gb partition of a 74gb Western Digital Raptor (newer 16mb version). After a few problems (Vista died when I started overclocking cpu so I had to reinstall) its working ok.

However I just hear the hard drive working most of the time - not thrashing but the odd access every 2-3 secs. I dont think its the drive as I dual boot with XP and thats not installed on this drive. When in XP I cant hear the drive in use.

On this 2nd install its also taken 4gb + extra disk space. When I check whats using that extra space I see the following files at root:

http://www.p1f.co.uk/root.jpg

Also more worrying when I check task manager under Performance Tab -> Physical Memory I see:

Total: 2046mb
Cached: 1434mb (this never seems to change)
Free: 30

Spec is as below:

Athlon 64 X2 3800+ @ 2.3ghz
Asus A8N-SLI
2gb (2x2x512mb) Geil DDR400
74GB Raptor 16mb OS/ Games
160GB WD Caviar Files
XFX 7800GT 256mb

Anyone got any ideas?

Cheers,
Simon

Regarding drive access, does it happen right off the fresh install?

Grab this http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sys...k/Filemon.mspx and see whats causing the drive to mash.

Regarding the root.jpg, hiber... is the hibernate file which will be the size of your ram as your ram is dumped there when your computer hibernates and the pagefile is for virtual memory which is set to the size of your ram as default. All normal.

what does a screen print of all the running processes (inc mem usage) look like?

What other software have you got. Some virus scanners do this...

Vista does some serious indexing. Which results in some serious disk activity for the first week or so of operation.

I've had to trurn indexing off as I imported such a large quantity of data, and it was trying to index it all for teh serach feature.

The search feature is very very good when indexing is on, so I would advise setting up indexing so it only covers data that your likely to serach for. Once everything is indexed, disc activity will decrease.


Also, there are background scheduled tasks, such as automatic disk defragmentation. Which runs every few weeks.

Finally, even with 2gig of Ram, Vista will have a huge variable size page file, which it will constantly need to access to swap data to and from the RAM. Not sure whats happening with your 2 gig, as my system is the same with regaurds to resources: 2046mb Total, 1465mb cached and 43mb Free, so I would say this is normal; as it probably uses free Ram as cache; but looking at the chart, the actual amount of RAM used on mine is 699mb. But my hard disk is doing nothing at the moment.

I would also advise to set the page file to a fixed size rather than variable, as the disk does some intensive thrashing if it decides to increase/decrease the page file size.

One final footnote is some Hard Drives when idle perform an automatic surface scan. My Western Digital does this and its was annoying as hell, the only way to stop it was to perfrom a task that required disk access (i.e click on something ;) ) to force it to cancel the surface scan. However since moving to Vista the drive doesn't get the chance to be idle long enough to perform the surface scan, so its actually alot quieter.