What is my HDD doing?

[Mattt]

It always seems to be making noises, but nothing major is running.

CPU and memory usage is low according to SysPerformance - is there something similar I can do to see what the HDD is upto?

[Zad]

What OS is it? Vista and (to a lesser extent) XP do some disk cataloguing and indexing in the background.

[Mattt]

Vista (for my sins)

[pies]

Mattt said:

Vista (for my sins)

In that case i think kis an known TVR trait as TADTS

[Mattt]

They all do that Sir?

[TheLearner]

It really does depend.

If the light is just flicking on/off occasionally it's Windows managing the swap file, writing logs and generally making itself busy in the background. All normal.

If the light has come on and the drive thrashes like mad until you do something, then it could be a degraggler running in idle time. Or anti-virus kicking its heels and investigating. Desktop Search things also tend to kick off when the user isn't doing anything so it could be that.

If the pitch of the drive has changed and/or it's making the occasional 'tink' noise before starting up again; that's usually a sign of bad juju at work. Dive in to the BIOS, look for SMART in Advanced options and turn it on. Also keep an eye in Event Viewer for "failed read" or "failed write" messages appearing. If SMART complains and/or you see those appearing, it's new HDD time.

[Mattt]

It's stopped doing it now, guess it might be an AV thing or defrag.