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Recently, I have noticed that my hard drive is always running. It did not use to to do this.

So I set about finding the offending program.

First, I looked at the obvious, A/V, Carbonite, things running in my System tray...No go.

Then I looked at all Processes and Services, still no luck.

Even if you leave the computer at the Window log in screen, the hard drive just runs.

Heck, the hard drive just runs and runs even in Safe Mode.

The wierd thing is that CPU and Network utilization remain at 0% when I nothing is running and still the hard drive cranks away.

I am running Norton 2011 and it has not found anything that should not be around, I have downloaded and ran various free Malware programs with no luck either.

I need some ideas, I dont want my hard drive cranking itself into an early grave yard.

Thank you

Scorpiuscat wrote:

I am running Norton 2011 and it has not found anything that should not be around

I'd look at that as one possibility. Not overly enamoured with Norton, even as many new reviews say it has improved.

Have you checked to see how much RAM is in use in Task Manager, and how much free space you have left on your hard drive?

If you run low on available RAM, your system will continuously swap to the hard drive. If you don't have much free space, you can also get a lot of grinding when swapping occurs.

Yes, I have 465GB's free on my hard drive and I am using 1.89gb's of RAM out of a total of 6GB's while idleing.

I have disabled Norton to see if that what it and still no change.

Have you looked in the system Event Log to see if it's generating any error messages regarding the hard drive? And if so, have you tried switching out the data cable?

ludi wrote:

Have you looked in the system Event Log to see if it's generating any error messages regarding the hard drive? And if so, have you tried switching out the data cable?

I could not find anything that specifically pointed to the hard drive.

Today, for the first time, the hard drive sat quietly for a bit, then this afternoon, it was back up to just running all the time.

- Try disabling the indexing service.
- Remove any folders you have from your "Music" library. I've found that Windows Media somethingsomething has this annoying habit of reindexing everything there. I know that's not a proper solution, but it was all I could do last time I came across this.

morphine wrote:

- Try disabling the indexing service.
- Remove any folders you have from your "Music" library. I've found that Windows Media somethingsomething has this annoying habit of reindexing everything there. I know that's not a proper solution, but it was all I could do last time I came across this.

Thanks for the advice. I have also had this problem on my hard drive. My csrss.exe was doin I/O reads upwards of 800,000 and I couldn't find a proper solution on any other website. Tried your index disable and now its down to 75,000.

Do you really care if your computer spends its idle time improving the disk index?

You can have Task Manager display columns for the number of I/Os each process is performing. That might give you some better clues than looking at process CPU usage.

TheWacoKid wrote:

Do you really care if your computer spends its idle time improving the disk index?

The indexing service can hurt performance of your foreground apps. It can also reduce the lifetime of the hard drive, and prevents the drive from ever spinning down to conserve power.

Thanks for the replies, I will check out the Indexing Service and see if makes a difference.

just brew it! wrote:

TheWacoKid wrote:

Do you really care if your computer spends its idle time improving the disk index?

The indexing service can hurt performance of your foreground apps. It can also reduce the lifetime of the hard drive, and prevents the drive from ever spinning down to conserve power.

I always set my drives to never spin down - when's the last time you had a drive die while it was spinning? Power cycling and thermal cycling (as well as parking the heads) is far worse on the drive than simply spinning.

TheWacoKid wrote:

when's the last time you had a drive die while it was spinning?

It appears you never experienced the phenomenon known as a head crash

But yeah, nevertheless, your point stands.

morphine wrote:

It appears you never experienced the phenomenon known as a head crash

But yeah, nevertheless, your point stands.

Actually I did, just last month. One of my Seagate Barracuda LP 2 TB drives took a dump after only 6 months of service. Seagate replaced it, no questions asked, with 2 day shipping, though, so I can't complain. Damn that's a lot of commas in one sentence.

It's by far the most rare problem I have personally seen though - I have a HUGE pile of dead drives that just...quit when spinning up from my old cluster. With 128 drives I was literally replacing one or two each time the damn thing was brought up from being shut down. Granted, the drives were all quite old at that point, but not once did a drive die when it was in service.

It's possible the drive has some bad sectors too... maybe try a chkdsk /r if disabling the indexing service doesn't improve the situation. I've seen bad drives grind away at nothing quite a few times.

TheWacoKid wrote:

I always set my drives to never spin down - when's the last time you had a drive die while it was spinning?

Most recent one was about 2 weeks ago, as a matter of fact. But it was one of those damn Seagate 11-series drives, so it was probably on borrowed time anyway.

TheWacoKid wrote:

Power cycling and thermal cycling (as well as parking the heads) is far worse on the drive than simply spinning.

Agreed. But if the indexing service is responsible, then it isn't "simply spinning" -- it is also doing a lot of seeking. And that can eventually cause trouble unless you've got an enterprise-class drive.

just brew it! wrote:

Agreed. But if the indexing service is responsible, then it isn't "simply spinning" -- it is also doing a lot of seeking. And that can eventually cause trouble unless you've got an enterprise-class drive.

Good point.

Didn't Google release a study about this a few years ago? I don't recall them saying there was a correlation between load and failure modes but it certainly makes sense that beating up the heads would make them fail earlier.

I have found the problem!!!!

I have 2 DVD drives and the bottom one that I dont use very often was missing from the list of drives when I clicked on the "My Computer" icon. I dont know why I did not notice this sooner.

Anyway, after fussing with it for a bit, it became clear that it not working correctly anymore, so I unplugged it from the mother board and my constant running hard drive issue went away.

JBI wrote:

The indexing service can hurt performance of your foreground apps.

Unlikely. The service has a very complex design and is built to be aware of the systems state.

http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/de ... n&id=21954

It can also reduce the lifetime of the hard drive,

Debatable. It's not like it never stops indexing. For example at this very moment the indexing service is not generating I/O activity on my box. The service is also designed to purposefully minimize writes to the disk.

and prevents the drive from ever spinning down to conserve power.

The service has a wholly different behavior pattern on battery. A time when conserving power is most critical. As noted above it also does not run forever.

Microsoft wrote:

Extensive testing and real-world feedback indicate that Windows Search does a good job of getting work done without affecting the foreground process and other background processes. Most of the techniques outlined in this paper were used to do so. Microsoft continues to monitor feedback and see the results in an ever broader base of customers, and uses that information to continue to tune Windows Search to balance citizenship and responsiveness to users.