HD's are under constant access

Every second my HD access led flashes 2-3 times, Ive been analizing the preformance monitor and I think the process "System" is responsable for this.

My rig is as follows
Pentium 4 2.53 Ghz 512 L2 533 FSP
Asus P4T533-C MB, i850E chipset
512 Megs 1066 RDRAM
Geforce 4 ti 4600
2x Western Digital HD's
Windows XP Home

The HD's are both on the primary useing cable select.


Any thoughts on what could be causeing the disk access? Is there some service that would be doing it?

C: drive is the one being accessed, and my virtual memory is on E: drive. I should need no virtual memory under normal operation anyhow.

well how are you HD's running? Are they running raid? or is one a slave and the other master? If its not running raid then the system sees it as two seperate drives and if it needs info from one for something on the other then it will be reading/writing a lot more.

No its not on raid.

The cable select mode auto sets them up as master and slave.

I realise that accessing data from either may be a little slower, but Im saying that there are continous read and write operations on the C: drive while the system is idle. I even installed a firewall to cut it from any net connection, and the HD light flashes constantly. a few times a second.

Is it possable that my ram is not functioning correctly?, Task Mannager shows over 330 megs of free ram, there should be no disk access at all when the system is idle correct?

Even if I end all the processes that are not critical I still have the problem. I think its a feature of XP thats working the disk. I would like to turn off system restore, but it says doing so completely wipes the system restore feature and I may need it.

Does the reading/writing stop momentarily when you move the mouse and then resume a few seconds later?

If so, it's a disk utility like Norton, or a an AntiVirus program hunting through your drive at idle time.

if the hard drive is always busy, the main problem is usually a virus etc.



source bigelow,2nd edition pc techs trouble shooter blah blah.. There are 15 other reasons but its late.........

You might find a utility on this website to help you.

if u installed the HD's you might wanna make sure the cables are in correctly (i once put the grey cable backwards...:p )

Sounds like a software thing. Some process like a Norton program or some other utility is a good guess, although a virus is possible. Have you tried killing tasks one at a time to see if you can stop the hd accesses. I don't know xp but in 95 you hit con-alt-del to call up the task list. Explorer and Systray are the only processes windows need to have running if I recall correctly. Might be different in xp.

Im telling you the most likely cause is a virus. Norton etc wont access all the time-in fact i hardly notice mine.

or. check the signal cable

or. replace the drive controller

oh man i lost the page in the book. if you still need help ill post the other 12 reasons. just say

Just reread your original post. Are you sure you are using CS? Because that is almost certainly the wrong way. You should be using a master/slave jumper setting (CS is something different), unless you are using very, very old hd's or motherboard. Maybe I'm misreading you, but that is something to check into.