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Author Topic: Hard Drive Activity on Vista  (Read 1810 times)

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BloodSugarWilksM

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Hard Drive Activity on Vista
« on: April 01, 2007, 06:06:53 PM »
So I've been using Windows Vista Business on my primary desktop for a few months now and overall I think it's great.  My only consistent nagging concern is Vista's handling of my hard drive. 

I've got a Seagate 320GB SATA 3.0Gb/s HDD and my Vista rating for my hard drive is 5.7.  I don't have a lot of stuff going on when my Vista OS is idle and yet, no matter what I'm doing Vista seems to "ping" my hard drive constantly (i.e. my activity light blinks all the time...).

My performance monitor for my dual core processor says that my cores hover around 0% to 5% when idle, and my RAM hovers around half capacity which is 1GB.  So I'm just not sure what the deal is. 

To compare, I have Ubuntu Edgy dual booted on this system and when I'm idle on Ubuntu, my hard drive NEVER blinks. 

Anyone have any insight or thoughts?

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OldManDeath

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Re: Hard Drive Activity on Vista
« Reply #1 on: April 01, 2007, 10:50:28 PM »
It is highly likely that it has to do with the indexing for search.  Other than that, I have no clue.
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BloodSugarWilksM

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Re: Hard Drive Activity on Vista
« Reply #2 on: April 01, 2007, 11:07:28 PM »
Good point OMD, I'll have to do some more research into that...
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BloodSugarWilksM

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Re: Hard Drive Activity on Vista
« Reply #3 on: April 01, 2007, 11:11:56 PM »
Oh I just found this too guys, it seems:

Also could be:

Indexing (desktop search)
Defrag (scheduled background)
Windows Defender Scaning

Probably more stuff.

The cool thing about Vistas internal stuff, IE the search indexer or the shadow copies is as soon as you do anything that requires the disk/io your forground operations get I/O priority - so whatever it is won't really slow you down. The kernal has that built in - it's very different then XP.


So basically Vista is designed to do this.  Interesting.
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Ryan Wagner

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Re: Hard Drive Activity on Vista
« Reply #4 on: April 02, 2007, 11:06:48 PM »
Yeah, I think Vista is a little more insistent on using idle time to make it more useful. If you think about how many files on your PC are constantly changing I would have to relate this to the search indexer. The background defragmentation typically just occurs once a week and if I remember correctly it is scheduled to run by default on Wednesday mornings (like 4AM or something).
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