What is causing hard drive grinding?

My windows (XP) hard drive grinds a lot and it negatively affects the performance of other applications.

I have plenty of RAM and have already verified that this hard drive activity is not page file swap activity. I have also already looked in task manager to see if only one or two processes are active but I have found no smoking gun.

What tools can I use to directly determine what application or feature of the OS is causing the hard drive activity?

Erv Walter

Posted 2009-07-26T15:26:16.153

Reputation: 385

Answers

Process Explorer. Make sure you show the columns that contain the I/O activity.

Sometimes you may see a process running multiple services that causes the activity. In that case, it requires a bit of guesswork.

Raymond Martineau

Posted 2009-07-26T15:26:16.153

Reputation: 294

OMG - In my case it was Razer gamescannerservice...WTH! – HDave – 2016-10-11T14:30:21.333

If the sound is new (i.e. a change from the past) it may indicate a worn bearing or other mechanical problem with the drive.

In that case, run-don't-walk to obtain a new drive and a transfer everything over pronto. The time to total failure from the onset of symptoms is not predictable.

Jeff's point is well taken. Not being a windows person, I don't know the tools, but other posters seem to have that well in hand. Here is a heuristic: If you can generate this behavior on an otherwise quiescent system by opening a medium sized document in notepad, you should be very worried indeed.

dmckee --- ex-moderator kitten

Posted 2009-07-26T15:26:16.153

Reputation: 7 311

2I'm not sure if that's what the OP was referring to (I think he meant regular, heavy hard drive activity). But it is true -- ANY unusual sounds from a hard drive mean you should PANIC and start backing up immediately – Jeff Atwood – 2009-07-26T16:19:27.123

And while you're running to the store to get the new hard drive, you could run smartmontools (http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/) to see if there's actually a problem with the drive. I watched one drive "rot" right in front of me - every day, there were a few more bad sectors. One day, it just wouldn't boot any more. (I had a replacement ready, but was curios as to how long it would last - it was just my boot disk, so there wasn't anything important on it.)

– chris – 2009-07-26T17:36:24.510

SysInternals Process Monitor is a tool that can monitor HDD activity in real-time, showing you what files are being accessed. Be warned though, it can be a bit of a firehose and can take a bit of practice to get the hang of.

Charles Roper

Posted 2009-07-26T15:26:16.153

Reputation: 9 646

Try DiskMon to see what drive activity is going on. It shows you both which programs are to blame and which files are involved.

Generally, all the tools from Sysinternals are great. I use Process Explorer often.

Kevin Panko

Posted 2009-07-26T15:26:16.153

Reputation: 6 339

Actually, DiskMon does not show process information (or file-system level information). FileMon does.

– Synetech – 2011-08-08T06:38:45.493