Vista - Noisy Hard Drive

Launch Vista's Administrative Tools --> Reliability and Performance Monitor program --> Disk Activity. Keep this program alive at all times, and when you hear hard-disk noise, switch to this program and you'll see what's using the disk.

I had this problem with Vista severely when I first got Vista (now a few years ago). I disabled a slew of Windows Services, and that greatly alleviated the problem, but didn't completely cure it. Recently the problem worsened on my computer and here's what has happened. I upgraded my web browser from Firefox 2.0 to Firefox 3.6. The newer Firefox version writes a small amount of data to the disk at frequent intervals even when the browser is idle, and it writes a larger amount after every webpage load. It's maintaining a record of browsing history and caching downloaded bytes. Now the problem with these smallish writes is that they induce much larger writes by the Vista System to "$LogFile(NTFS Volume Log)" and "NTFS Master File Table". I can see that in the disk activity monitoring program. Vista is also writing to other Vista log files at freqeunt intervals such as the SCM.EVM file and "System Volume Information". Aside from the sheer number of bytes written, these writes to Vista log files relocate the hard-disk arm away from the place that Firefox wants it at on the disk.

This is a terrible noise pollution to me when I'm reading material online -- low-grade disk activity is incessant. It's comparable to being in a university library with two fools chattering incessantly at the table next to me. I try to igore it, and I'm capable of ignoring it, but it bothers the ____ out of me. It bothers me so much that I'm now going to revert to Firefox 2.0, which doesn't write to the disk nearly as much as Firefox 3.6. I regard this as a Firefox problem only secondarily: It's a Vista problem primarily. And as far as I know there's no Vista solution, and I've put considerable time and energy into finding out what else can be disabled in Vista to reduce the chattering.

 

I haven't had this problem on my system, but I've had clients who have and here are some of the procedures I found helpful in attenuating the problem (though I was never really able to make it go completely away - but sometimes it helped quite a bit to the point where it was no longer considered to be a problem).

Go tohttp://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb963902.aspx and run Autoruns and click on the Everything Tab.  Look for anything you don't need starting at startup (and often running periodically throughout the day) and unxheck the box to stop it from starting at startup.  If you have expert assistance (like the person who posted this question), then you can also check services as well - many start and run but are never actually used.  Check the whole list but be careful because some of that is required and removing the wrong programs or service can cause serious consequences (in other words, if you remove something, know what it is and why you don't really need it at startup - many are helper applications for the real programs which would start anyway without these entries in start-up but these entries take up resources and make the hard drive work harder than it needs to).  When done, click OK and reboot.

If that doesn't work, try a clean boot http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929135.  This does essentially the same thing but more comprehensively and with a procedure to find and resolve the causes.  If the problem goes away then it's just a matter of tracking down the culprit or culprits causing the problem.   Follow the procedures in the article.  Once found, delete, remove, deactivate, or uninstall it or them (or reschedule them so they are spread out more and maybe don't all occur around the same time).  Once done be sure to reset Vista back to normal status as explained in the procedures. If the problem occurs in clean mode then just restore the system to normal status and reboot - this solution is not going to work.

 

 

You may be infected with malware (if working in the background, it can get your hard drive running hard doing whatever it's trying to do and so it needs to be located and removed). Try to run anti-malware programs (in safe mode with networking ifnecessary). To fix this problem (if it is a problem) download, install, and run the following two programs:http://www.malwarebytes.org/mbam.php andhttp://www.safer-networking.org/en/index.html.  You may also want to try a free trial of Pandasoft (http://www.pandasecurity.com/usa/homeusers/solutions/global-protection/).  Before downloading pandasoft, uninstall whatever anti-virus program you are currently using (because installing and running two at the same time can cause conflicts, freezes, and all sorts of problems).  Once you've uninstalled your current AV program, download, install, update, and scan using Pandasoft.  I think you might be amazed at how much it finds that the other software missed.  Once complete, uninstall pandasoft and re-install your current AV program (unless you decide to switch which I did when I first tried it about 4 years ago).  You may also want to try the new, free Microsoft Security Essentialshttp://www.softpedia.com/progDownload/Microsoft-Security-Essentials-Download-131683.html (with the same caveat that only ONE AV program can be installed and running on your system at any one time).  You may also want to try the free Avira at:http://www.free-av.com/ and Avast at: http://www.avast.com/index.  Reboot after completing all the scans.  You may also want to try the free OneCare athttp://onecare.live.com/site/en-us/default.htm and let it run all the options (except the registry cleaner) because that’s good maintenance (it will take some time to complete but can be done in the background).

 

 

I hope this helps.  Please keep me posted.

 

 

Good luck!

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Lorien - MCSE/MCSA/Network+/A+ --- If this post helps to resolve your issue, please click the "Mark as Answer" or "Helpful" button at the top of this message. By marking a post as Answered, or Helpful you help others find the answer faster.