Harddrive noise even when no activity on computer

[miku 0]

hi guys,

 

i am having very strange problem. the hard drive noise is always there on the computer. the activity LED is NOT lit though but the noise is there even though i am not doing anything on the computer. It was ok when I installed windows and everything but now it isn't like that. Any suggestions. By the way, I have been copying a lot of data into and out of the HD.

 

The Harddrive is 160GB WesterDigital 7200RPM drive.

 

Thanks.

AC

[galink 0]

Just a guess but it sounds like the hard drive buffering. Maybe you need to adjust the settings for the synching of the data transfer or for the buffering or read/write buffering.

[Jerry Atrik 0]

yea sounds like pagefile cacheing

if theres enough system memory u can just turn it off.

 

 

now days most systems have so much memory they dont really need a pagefile, nor do they need the pagefile to be cached.

[Sampson 0]

As Alec stated there is a lot of housekeeping going on in the background. This used to be a notorious shortcoming of Win98 especially as screensavers tended to fill Ram and the hard disk churned like a washing machine in response.

If you are concerned (though WesternDigitals are considered to be very stable) you could run chkdsk and then defragment the hard drive to make your disk is more "breatheable", in other words, more contiguous. This should re-index the drive and provide more contiguous space for data. I would suggest that you might want to invest in a good defragment program. The names of two I am familiar with and use are PerfectDisk and O&O.

[Jerry Atrik 0]

i agree alex.. never turn the pagefile off

but u can turn off the "pagefile executive" which turns off the caching.

 

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management

 

change

DisablePagingExecutive from 0 to 1 and your had drive will stop precaching...

 

it's very very helpful for new drives that have a huge internal buffer