[leachim]

Just wondering how I can tell what is making the HDD work for certain periods of time.

You can tell it is doing something by the ticking noises it makes - I have disabled Indexing and not sure if Task Manager is the right thing to check this ?

Thanks

[kimsland]

Constant sound comming from the harddrive can be one of two things:

The HardDrive is about to fail !

The harddrive is being written to or read from
This can occur by background:
Updating
Defrag (namely Vista Task)
Scheduled tasks ( control Panel)
Restore (usually not lengthy)
indexing (covered)
Scans (Antivirus seems to check ll the time)
Actually lots of things !
Power management
Network/Internet

The list goes on

Start with TaskManager and find out which service in using the most (or second most) cpu

[leachim]

Thanks

Ticking perhaps wasn't the best description - maybe "working" would be better :0

I have checked the cpu when this happens, and not a lot of cpu is being used - I will check again though

[myfavoritemartin]

Have you tried defragmenting the drive?

[cherry pie]

If you're not sure if it's working, ticking, clicking, clucking twitching bumping then I would definitely say backup your file immediately before doing anything else... trust me no one wants to deal with lost data

Cheers

[managed]

To be sure download the maker's diagnostic utility and run it.

[kimsland]

Originally Posted by leachim

Thanks

Ticking perhaps wasn't the best description - maybe "working" would be better :0

I have checked the cpu when this happens, and not a lot of cpu is being used - I will check again though