vista over-working my hard drive?

[Dieb11]

Hey all. I have a new rig, using vista 64. Everything is running great, but I have one simple question. My harddrive is running pretty much ALL the time, even when I have nothing running. Has anyone else using vista noticed this? Is there something vita does that could explain why my HDD is always churning away?

 

[oynaz]

How much RAM do you have?

 

[imported_FishTaco]

Indexing is going over your files to make searching faster.

Superfetch is loading files into memory to speed up load times.

I believe by default Defrag is scheduled to run once a week in the background.

After you install a program or driver, System Restore will be using the disk to make restore points.

 

[0roo0roo]

you can't overwork the drive.
they die pretty arbitrarily regardless of how you treat them according to studies if thats what you are worried about
if its lack of ram, buy more..you should really have 2gb
and yea superfetch/indexing are givens

 

[MetaDFF]

Assuming you have enough ram, that churning is pretty much the drive trying to index everything. The first thing I did after installing Vista was disable indexing globally on the entire HDD, and then manually selected the directories that I actually wanted indexed (i.e. Documents etc.). It saves me from having to hear my hard drive grinding every time I'm on the computer.

The only catch with disabling indexing globally is that searching in a non-indexed location is slower. But I think it's a good trade off since most of the stuff you want to find are going to be your own documents / downloads and not some random windows dll files it spends all its time indexing.

 

[SickBeast]

Vista MANGLED my HDD for about 3 months, then it settled down. Now every time I install something big like a game, it takes a few days to sort itself out.

I guess it's the indexing *shrug*.

 

[Intelman07]

Indexing, automatic defrag, superfetch, all of those could contribute to the hard drive activity. I wouldn't worry about it, activity will not make your drive die any quicker, Google's study seems to think so at least. I defrag my drives all the time and they don't seem to die quickly...

... failure rates did not correspond to drive usage except in very young and old drives

Source

 

[jonmcc33]

Originally posted by: FishTaco
Indexing is going over your files to make searching faster.

Superfetch is loading files into memory to speed up load times.

I believe by default Defrag is scheduled to run once a week in the background.

After you install a program or driver, System Restore will be using the disk to make restore points.

Superfetch doesn't load files into memory. It loads applications.

What is going on is indexing. The bigger the hard drive and the more data you have on it the more that Vista is going to work the hard drive. It's helpful for the search feature but if you have a 500GB+ hard drive that's full of data and tens of thousands of files then it will be going for quite some time...