HDD-Activity .. what is doing where and why?

[Micheal]

Hi everybody,
i am sitting here, writing this mail, and while doing so my HD is working,
working and working .. i have no idea what is actually happening.

I have disabled indexing, i have closed the media player, i have stopped all
media center services and i cant think of anything besides those who would
wade through all my files continously. Is vista performing some maintenance
or something? But why it does that while i am working ? I mean... hey.. i
have loaded all programs i need and i am just writing these words into the
ram .. i dont want my PC to be quiet now!

Could someone please tell me how i can find out what is going on in the
background? I wanna know what program is accessing my harddisk and literally
consuming all my I/O performance.

Help!

Thanks in advance.

 

[HDFatBoy2003]

Given that you disabled most of the known culprits, the only others thing
that is probably happening is a defrag. Vista will defrag automatically in
the background, especially after first being installed. Then it goes on a
weekly\daily schedule depending on your input.

 

[Gene]

Depending on how long you have had Vista installed, it may still be indexing
your hard drive. Part of Vista is the quick search system, already mapping
and indexing your hard drive making it easier not only for you to find
something when you use the search option, but to open files and folders more
quickly when you click on them the old fashoned way.
It does this by searching your hard drive and creating tables for where
everything is.
What is SHOULD do, after a while of searching and getting your files and
folders mapped, is stop baking.

then again, most maintenance items vista does, it does in the background, so
it may be doing defrag. It is another beauty of Vista, the idea that the
maintenance is done in the background, with a lowered priority, making it
un-intrusive, and seemingly invisible to the user.

Don't worry, if your hard drive is running mad, let it run. Vista is just
doing it's job.

 

[Timu CHEN]

I assume VISTA is recording a restore point. This happens all the time.
Try to disable system restore, very similar to the way you did in XP.
And see if HDD indicator still gives you working signal while you do
nothing.

Timu

 

[Byron Hinson]

Exactly right - most of the time its doing shadow recordings, this could be
large files/small files and usually happens on boot or after you delete a
file/folder.