• Welcome to Overclockers Forums! Join us to reply in threads, receive reduced ads, and to customize your site experience!

Busy hard drive during idle

Overclockers is supported by our readers. When you click a link to make a purchase, we may earn a commission. Learn More.

Pyrotechnic

Member
Joined
May 27, 2002
Location
Austin, TX
In my PIII 733 system, it's got a 10K RPM SCSI drive that has a pretty audible seek noise. I've noticed that if the system sits idle for a few minutes, the hard drive starts sounding VERY busy for awhile, then if I go over and touch the mouse, it all stops. If I let it do it's thing, it'll stop after awhile. I'm running Windows XP Pro.

I'm guessing this is just Windows cleaning up the page file or temp files or is this or do I have a larger problem ?
 
It's more than likely the Indexing Service... you can disable it (Start | Run | Type services.msc, and click OK | Scroll down to Indexing Service, right click and select "Properties" | In the "Startup type" field, select "Disabled"... then hit the "Stop" button).

Or you could leave the Indexing Service set to the default Startup type of Manual, but change the performance level that the service runs at. Type compmgmt.msc /s in the Run box | In the Computer Management window, expand Computer Management --> Services and Applications --> Indexing Service | "Action" menu --> Stop | "Action" menu --> All Tasks --> Tune Performance. What I do is then click the "Customize" button in the Indexing Service Usage dialog, which then opens the Desired Performance dialog. I then move the Indexing slider to Lazy, and the Querying slider to Low load... both of these settings use the least amount of resources. After closing the dialogs, you'll then need to restart (or reset the Startup type to Manual) the Indexing Service.
 
Thanks for the info. Didn't think of the Indexing Service. I just got a little suspicious when I would move to another computer, the drive in that one would start going crazy and when I touched the mouse it would stop. Thought I had a virus or trojan for a minute.
 
Back