Anyone else seeing (hearing!) HD activity when 'idle'?

[Steve Y]

I'm running RC2 and so far I've not had any issues with software
compatibility or instability.

However, I've notice that when the system is idle (i.e. in the evening),
the hard drive just grinds away and is starting to become very annoying.
It continues like this overnight and into the morning. Generally I leave
Firefox and Thunderbird running.

I looked at I/O reads and writes using task manager and two processes
seem to be the culprits. SearchIndexer seems to have a slow background
poll of my hard drives running but that's not the one that has the most
activity. The system process lsass.exe (Local Security Authority
Process)is doing three reads and three writes a second most of the time.
Does anyone see the same thing? Anyone know why and how I can get my
system to truly idle?

 

[Guest]

I noticed the same thing. The only reason I can think of, is microsoft
expecting everyone to use a hibrid hard drives when available.

 

[humphry]

Now you noticed that? Another reason why vista sucks....
It wants to go along indexing everything for searches.. but indexing is a
bad way to solve the search problem when you have lots of files changing
(say you have broadband)....

Its a good way to reduce the lifetime of your hard drive! Way to go MS!
Another crappy idea
implemented! The first thing I always did in xp was turn off all
indexing....

 

[Bob]

Using a hard drive reduces its life? What world do you live in. I run twelve
servers and there hard drives are running 24 / 7 with no failures in over 5
years. I guess you know nothing about computers.

Your disk drive may be running because you can set defrag to run every day.
Its simply NOT going to hurt your system at all when you disk drives are
used.

 

[Ray]

Looking over the help file in RC2 it says indexing cannot be turned off like
in Windows XP

 

[progressive realization]

lol....

disk spinnind does not reduce life, disk writing and reading all the time
does... (thrashing)

If what you state is true please do the following experiment...

take 2 similar drives,
1 that is just turned on
1 that is reading and writing all the time 24/7

see which one fails first....

 

[progressive realization]

perhaps there will be a patch registry edit...

if not thrashing the hard disk all the time is a very bad thing. Indexing
may be good for some normal users...
but for power users that change their files too much each day it is a
nightmare... since it makes the hard disk thrash, and it will never index
the files fast enough to reflect the changes.. so its worthless.... thats
why power users avoid all similar programs, like google desktop, copernic
desktop, and the microsoft one...

With new hard disks that will be terrabytes.... and faster internet
connections comming, with the present hard disk technology indexing is a
problem.

It will just be too slow to keep up and use too much cpu and create noise..
for laptops that will also mean less battery time...

When new solid state hard drives come out (no moving parts), indexing will
again be worthless, since the search will be very fast...

 

[Steve]

I must have slowed down in my old age

I am a power user, and indexing does help me, I will do a quick test now

I emailed a customer at about 12:30, I have over 9000 items in my inbox, I
just hit start entered a few key words, and its found my email

that's not bad, I have just eaten my lunch, so maybe that's why, but it does
seam to work for me.

Steve

 

[Guest]

lol....

disk spinnind does not reduce life, disk writing and reading all the time
does... (thrashing)

If what you state is true please do the following experiment...

take 2 similar drives,
1 that is just turned on
1 that is reading and writing all the time 24/7

see which one fails first....

You assume many things here. Like assuming when you computer in on but idle
there is no disk I/O (there is always gonna be some disk I/O unless you
computer is asleep). You also assume reading and writing to a disk shortens
it's life. I've never seen any evidence to show a connection between the two.
For example, I've had a laptop drive fail after 1 1/2 years of life (probably
60 days of actual run time). Yet I have a TiVo that's over three years old,
and the harddrive is just fine. And the TiVo is ALWAYS reading and writing to
disk while it's on. And I never turn it off. So that's over 1000 hours of run
time. (I assume the laptop drive failed as a freak case or something.)

Anyhow, Indexing the file system while idle is a very good thing. Well it
should be a good thing (though Vista's indexing has some annoying flaws while
I'll get to in a second). If the disk trashing is annoying you, it's cuz you
have a noisy harddrive. Noisy hard drives are a problem with PCs. Macs,
Consoles, TiVos, etc... noisy harddrives aren't much of an issue (the fan
makes more noise in my TiVo then either of the two HDDs).

I was expecting Vistas indexing to be like MacOS X's (10.4) SpotLight.
Spotlight indexes everything, including content, on the fly. Modifying a file
updates the index instantly. Spotlight has someproblems that need addressed,
but at least it FINDS everything. Vista... it doesn't find things. I type in
the name of an application, it doesn't find it. I check the help file, says
it doesn't index programs. Then I find that it only indexes certain file
types. And I don't know if it indexes data streams (metadata). Lastly, does
it support some type of plugin arcitecture for scanning contents of certain
file types? I don't know? I don't know a lot really. I do know that it's not
indexing everything it should. And it should index EVERYTHING (relevent).
Having an index to speed of searching only works if it the index matches the
contents of the media. So to find things, I still have to tell search to find
things that aren't indexed. This defeats the point entirely.

I hope this is rectified by the final release (though I doubt it).

 

[Guest]

I was expecting Vistas indexing to be like MacOS X's (10.4) SpotLight.
Spotlight indexes everything, including content, on the fly.

Vista indexing has a lot of settings and it's able to indexing file names,
metadata, data, and what you want.

Spotlight has someproblems that need addressed,
but at least it FINDS everything. Vista... it doesn't find things. I type in
the name of an application, it doesn't find it. I check the help file, says
it doesn't index programs.

I'm able to find everrything, applications, files, mails, etc.
So I think you're just a stupid troll