Hard drive constantly ticking over

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timmmay

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#147430 19-Jun-2014 07:37

I have a Windows 7 PC, up to date. SSD for OS, SSD for another disk, but three spinning data disks as well. I can hear the spinning disks when they're doing something.

In the past couple of days there has been constant disk activity - not solid, but disk access once a second that never stops. I've done a virus scan, two malware scans, shut down various services, rebooted a couple of times, made sure there were no windows updates, but nothing seems to make a difference. Looking in the task manager performance monitor thingy it looks like chrome is using the disk, but there's no chrome process listed in task manager - I shut it off.

The two things I've changed recently are:
- Defragmented my 2TB disk (which is 80% full)
- Set up Astrill using windows VPN services.

Any thoughts/tips/suggestions? The noise is just annoying.

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MikeB4
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#1068990 19-Jun-2014 07:43

P2P uploading?
Disk indexing?

Here is a crazy notion, lets give peace a chance.

timmmay

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#1068991 19-Jun-2014 07:49

There's not P2P active, but that does do a similar thing. I have windows disk indexing turned off, I do use "Everything" to search, but that's not active - I checked, then turned it off to be sure. Thanks for the ideas :)

MikeB4

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#1069002 19-Jun-2014 07:59

Do you have an optical drive? It could be that polling for auto insert.

Here is a crazy notion, lets give peace a chance.

timmmay

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#1069005 19-Jun-2014 08:03

Why would that start suddenly though? I'll have a look tonight though.

andrewNZ

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#1069009 19-Jun-2014 08:26

Does the task manager disk activity section give any clues?

bagheera

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#1069012 19-Jun-2014 08:34

timmmay: I have a Windows 7 PC, up to date. SSD for OS, SSD for another disk, but three spinning data disks as well. I can hear the spinning disks when they're doing something.

Any thoughts/tips/suggestions? The noise is just annoying.

open resource monitor (there should a link in task manager on the performance tab if i remember right) click on the disk tab and look at process that are currently reading or writing to the disk

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timmmay

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#1069019 19-Jun-2014 08:55

andrewNZ: Does the task manager disk activity section give any clues?

You mean the resource monitor? The process CPU usage doesn't give any useful clues.

bagheera: open resource monitor (there should a link in task manager on the performance tab if i remember right) click on the disk tab and look at process that are currently reading or writing to the disk

Yeah I'm trying that. Things like Chrome are registering (even though it's turned off), and things like svchost.exe which are difficult to track down. Mostly though nothing relevant seems to be showing.

andrewNZ

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#1069022 19-Jun-2014 09:02

Yea I meant resource monitor, couldn't remember the name.

I hope it's not Cryptolocker.

bagheera

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#1069023 19-Jun-2014 09:07

timmmay:Yeah I'm trying that. Things like Chrome are registering (even though it's turned off), and things like svchost.exe which are difficult to track down. Mostly though nothing relevant seems to be showing.

and have you click on the disk activity tab - that has the exe and path that it reading / writing to which should give you a clue - like here i can see that my searchindexer.exe is going over my drive

timmmay

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#1069035 19-Jun-2014 09:24

andrewNZ: Yea I meant resource monitor, couldn't remember the name.

I hope it's not Cryptolocker.

I have excellent backups so it wouldn't be a huge deal, but fingers crossed it's not.

bagheera: and have you click on the disk activity tab - that has the exe and path that it reading / writing to which should give you a clue - like here i can see that my searchindexer.exe is going over my drive

Yeah that's the first place I looked - nothing concrete stands out. I'll have another look tonight and maybe post a screen shot.

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#1069040 19-Jun-2014 09:28

timmmay:

Yeah that's the first place I looked - nothing concrete stands out. I'll have another look tonight and maybe post a screen shot.

look for things that are reading / writing to the spinning disk drive as they will be the ones that are making the noise for you, not the stuff on the SSD drive, then hard bit of working out why it reading / writing there.

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timmmay

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#1069044 19-Jun-2014 09:32

Yeah, I'll puzzle through tonight. I realise SSDs don't make a noise ;)

timmmay

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#1069309 19-Jun-2014 16:04

Screen shot of the resource monitor here.

I've stopped all services that don't look core, I've killed user space processes, nothing should be running - but the hard drive just won't stop! There's nothing registering as using the physical drives at all.

Confused! Help! I'm worried it's doing something it shouldn't be.

timmmay

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#1069390 19-Jun-2014 17:16

Ok something weird is going on. It's my WD Black 2TB drive, which is used purely for media. If I unplug the SATA cable the ticking continues, though of course removing power stops it. If I plug power back in it starts up again, even without the SATA cable. So my conclusion is the drive itself is doing something.

I wonder if this is on the way to failure... my SMART software isn't reporting any problems. 2971 starts/stops, 10,000 hours use, no spin retries, no reallocated sectors, no errors reported at all. Western Digital Data Lifeguard reports no problems.

Still stumped!

hio77

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#1069409 19-Jun-2014 17:33

timmmay: Ok something weird is going on. It's my WD Black 2TB drive, which is used purely for media. If I unplug the SATA cable the ticking continues, though of course removing power stops it. If I plug power back in it starts up again, even without the SATA cable. So my conclusion is the drive itself is doing something.

I wonder if this is on the way to failure... my SMART software isn't reporting any problems. 2971 starts/stops, 10,000 hours use, no spin retries, no reallocated sectors, no errors reported at all. Western Digital Data Lifeguard reports no problems.

Still stumped!

if the drive is doing it, while unplugged.. i suspect it may be dud.

best go into recovery mode ASAP.. sounds like its informing you its on its deathbed :c

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