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why is my HDD continually accessed on idle?

Posted: Mon May 28, 2007 3:23 am
by ucsdmike
Does your T60 do this? It seems to access the harddisk on the average twice a second for a split second. My z60t didn't do this. I basically went through and stopped every service I can stop, then I killed every process except the ones required by the system. It still keeps doing it. I also went ahead and disabled the swap files.

I have a 2GB of RAM in my T60. The 100GB 7200RPM drive.

My theories are that the 2GB of ram makes windows want to do some kind of checking or offloading on the harddrive (seperate from the swap files). or that its part of the harddrive's design of how it operates, and is doing some low level hard drive driven defragmentation.

I'm sure it definitely has an impact on the battery life, and I'm beginning to realize that my z60t is virtually silent compared to the t60.

Re: why is my HDD continually accessed on idle?

Posted: Mon May 28, 2007 8:12 am
by Jimco
ucsdmike wrote:Does your T60 do this? It seems to access the harddisk on the average twice a second for a split second.
Does this make a clicking sound like a clock ticking? I had a Toshiba that did that a few years back and I was able to resolve it using a setting in Intel Application Accelerator. The setting changed a particular IDE channel to full power instead of power savings.

Posted: Mon May 28, 2007 11:08 am
by RonS
Run this free utility and get the definitive answer on what your hard drive is doing:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysint ... lemon.mspx

Posted: Mon May 28, 2007 11:18 am
by brentpresley
XP or Vista?


If it is Vista, it is probably A) indexing the hard drive for a faster search and/or B) prefetching programs into memory so they load faster when you click on them.

A will subside over time as there are fewer and fewer files to index.

B will not.