So whenever I leave my computer on idle for a few minutes, something starts writing to my hard drive. It’s the only 4TB hard drive I have, everything else is an SSD.
Whenever I move the mouse, it stops. I left Task Manager open and saw that the disk usage was 100% and read and write speeds are in the 50MBps rate.
I’ve run complete anti-virus scans, tried to see what process is accessing and I don’t see anything that stands out particularly. Maybe it’s the disk defragmentor?
Anyone else have this experience? The only reason I know is because my HDD is loud and I can hear it writing when it’s idle.
But you can check the system monitor (leave it open and don’t move mouse! ) to see what program is causing network or disk I/O. Task Manager sadly has too little information about single processes and is more of an overview than a diagnostics tool.
If you really want to track down what process is generating the disk activity you can use Resource Monitor as @Exard3k suggested. Choose the Disk tab and then sort the Disk Activity pane by “Total (B/sec)” so you’ll see the most active process on top. Also expand both the ‘Image’ and ‘File’ columns as you will probably need both of them to make sense of what the process is actually doing.
There are 2 services that I disable on any windows install. SYSMAIN and “Connected User Experience and Telemetry”. Both of those will peg a HDD at 100% for no reason and neither are required to run Windows properly.
go here download the suite and run diskmon it will tell you which files are being read and written to.
this is a good little toolbox for monitoring most things on your system. so check em out
Did you find a solution?
I installed a new SDD as C: and moved my HDD to F: and haven’t touched the HDD since the change.
Every now and then something reads/writes the HDD noisily.
I’ve turned Defender and telemetry off and limited indexing to C: programs
Paging (swapfile) is to the SSD.
I have no scheduled defrag.
While the HDD was being aggressively read, I opened perfmon /res to monitor which processes were using the drive. Answer: Not one.
So Windows has a process which reads a drive without logging it.
Reason I went to SSD was because my son opened a Microsoft account to play Sea of Thieves and when I switched back to local account, the PC started taking 5-7 minutes of sitting silently during the logon screen.
Which made me wonder if it was trying to connect to Microsoft even though I was on local.
) to see what program is causing network or disk I/O. Task Manager sadly has too little information about single processes and is more of an overview than a diagnostics tool.