Summary: There are several reasons you might see hard disk activity when you're not doing something yourself. It's not hard to see what's causing it.
Why, when I'm doing nothing at all, will my hard disk suddenly start thrashing?
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It could be for many reasons. The most common are anti-virus tools or the system indexing service if it's enabled.
To find out what's happening on your system, we'll use a filesystem monitoring tool. Download FileMon from the folks over at Sysinternals.com. It works on Windows 95 or later, and Windows NT 4 or later.
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When you run FileMon you'll probably be surprized at how much your system is already doing while you're not doing anything. As long as the disk isn't thrashing (it's possible that it's not even being hit at this point), it's all quite normal. Let FileMon run.
As soon as you hear your hard disk thrashing when you think it shouldn't be, press CTRL+E in FileMon to stop the capture. The last few screens should be full of disk access by the offending application.
What we may determine is that this is expected behaviour for your system. However we might also decide that whatever is running is unwanted, and we'll work through the steps to turn it off or remove it.
Article C1828 - August 10, 2003
All the above suggestions are 'over my head' so, I guess I will have to listen to the growling that is called thrashing by the literate above. I, too, wonder if this is taking up disk space which seems to be decreasing as time goes by and I do not add downloads or new programs. Defrag.,scanned often.
Posted by: Anne Dakmak at March 10, 2007 2:37 PMTo stop thrashing hard drive in Windows XP, alter the setting of memory from the default (adjust for best performance of programs) to 'adjust for best performance of system cache'. There are no bad side effects.
Posted by: James Baring at March 15, 2007 5:47 AMI ran process monitor on my wife's computer because its HD keeps running even though I have shut off indexing and defrag. It has hundreds of entries where snippit is opened and closed. She doesn't even know what snippit is. I do use it on my computer and have months ago on hers. Is it likely that there is some sort of key logging or similar spy process going on?
Posted by: John P. Brown at April 21, 2009 12:20 PMI had a similar problem. My hard drive would thrash constantly on a pretty fast Core i7 compy with 12Gig RAM. It was infuriating. I searched the intertubes and came across this thread. I tried what was suggested, but it didn't fix my problem. I did fix my problem though.
It turns out my outlook.ost file was too big. I found out from Microsoft that you may experience issues with .ost files over 2Gig. Well, mine was over 19Gig!
I closed down Outlook. Then I just renamed the file outlook_bak20091216.ost. I then launched Outlook and it rebuilt the outlook.ost file from the Exchange server. My new outlook.ost file is under 1Gig. Better yet, no more hard drive thrashing.
Posted by: willgill at December 17, 2009 4:26 AMMy harddrive will start thrashing, and the screen goes blank. I can hear the processor cooling fan kick into high speed. This doesnt happen very often but it will do it at an idle or when im working. I am running xp with sp3. I do have spyware/virus programs. I am cut off from accessing the computer when this happens so I have no idea what is causing it or what happens as I have to pull the plug to stop it. I let it run for 10 mins one time to see if it would stop.
Posted by: Joe Harper at January 23, 2010 4:25 PMAny ideas where I should start? Will "filemon" record all activity even if I pull the plug?