Hard Disk Continuous Activity

I have a brand new K430 Desktop running WIN7 Home Premium with a 2Tb SATA/600 hard drive.
The hard disk access light flashes continually at a constant repetition rate of roughly 1 to 2 times/second (and I can hear the hard drive heads thumping faintly at this rate).
I have no viruses, and Crystal Disk reports the hard drive has no issues. I ran the Windows Resources utility, selected the Hard Disk window and monitored the processes & apps doing read/writes to the hard disk. The preloaded McAfee Antivirus Plus occasionally accesses the Hard disk heavily, then goes away. There are other Windows System functions (logging etc) that occasionally access heavily too. All the drive accessing shown in the Resources utility are random with no apparent pattern nor specific repetition rate.
Not sure if this is a Windows issue or a hard disk hardware "feature", but at this rate the hard disk will likely wear out prematurely.
I Google'd this and found that folks having the issue tried various adjustments/options with Windows drive indexing to no avail. So, indexing does not appear to be the problem.
Any thoughts or suggestions would be much appreciated.

You can have a look to processes which access your HDD:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896646
and
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896645
Set filters (from menu) to get a better overview.
My home-forum: http://www.thinkpad-forum.de
Wiki: Deutsches ThinkPad-Wiki English ThinkWiki
My ThinkPad-Collection

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IMac goes into sleep mode although hard disk is active

Hello,
my Mac has a large task to do - it should rebuild a corrupted iPhoto library which takes a long time.
So I though I leave my iMac running in the night and after it's finished it will activate sleep mode (which is set to 1 hour of inactivity).
However when I leave my Mac it activates sleep mode (after that 1 hour) while the task is still running.
I thought when there's write activity on the hard disk, the sleep mode won't be activated...
What am I thinking wrong or is there a wrong setting?
I'm using iPhoto Library Manager to rebuild the iPhoto database which has no option to sleep after the task is done so here won't be a chance to do that.
Thanks!
Markus

The sleep timeout has nothing to do with disk activity. It's based on user input, although some background processes can pre-empt it. If you don't want the machine to sleep automatically, disable automatic sleep in the Energy Saver preference pane.

CS3 version activation after hard disk crash?

I tried to activate the CS3 version again, now after installing it to the new hard disk from original AI CD. Old image of old hard disk AI is in separate folder /Good Files . When contacting Adobe to register, AI registration automat tells me to (this next is a screen copy)
Registration Unsuccessful
A problem was encountered while trying to send information over the Internet.
Please select one of the following options:
Try submitting the online registration again
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Maybe registration module sent the message to some old Internet address at Adobe? My PC works fine in Internet. I have Avast Antivirus in use.
2 weeks ago I was in Laos, and use of this AI CS3 was acute in one project and I contacted Adobe support
(Adobe Case Update : 0212023920 : Badari N ) to try to solve this problem from the /Good Files recovery installation. After some chat and trials, Adobe person gave me advice to try to install from the CD. Ok, I traveled to Helsinki and found (lucky person!!) the CD, made new install, but the registration stuck. Maybe somebody from Adobe can help me?
MArp

I ticked never register..... I can then go to the 18 MB map project.pdf
file and read it and use zoom, moving around-pan (hand) and levels menu...
levels visible or not...that is ok so far. I have not yet started to draw
anything and save so far... I can reopen that file normally without any
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Maybe this is all ok and I can continue using AI CS3 many months/years
without registration.
Maybe this registration thing is not needed for active use???
I may to morrow try to save some changes to the project.pdf.... now time
is here 01.39 midnight.
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Unusual hard disk activity after "Erase free space"

I have two partitions on my hard disk - a small partition for the system software and a big partition for everything else. A few days ago, I backed up a few files from my big partition and then used Disk Utility "Erase free space". Since then, my hard disk is behaving oddly. I can hear it, as if it continuously reading and writting data. At first, I thought it was an auto-update in progress or some sort of automatic system maintenance. But the odd behavior never stopped. I scanned my files with an anti-virus software - nothing wrong. I scanned my files with Disk Utility - nothing wrong. I used Onyx to check the system - nothing wrong. I even erased and reinstalled the system software - no changes! So what could possibly force my hard disk to behave like that? Is something messed up because of "Erase free space"?

You could run fs_usage
To view file activity for all processes with the fs_usage tool, you would enter the following at the Terminal prompt.
sudo fs_usage
If you wanted to limit the display to files accessed by a particular process, you could redirect the output through the grep tool. For example, to display file behavior for the TextEdit application, you would enter the following at the Terminal prompt:
% sudo fs_usage | grep TextEdit
Once your application finishes launching, stop fs_usage by typing Control-C in your Terminal window.
Look for all writes. Might be mdworker (Spotlight)
Try reindexing Spotlight by dragging the HD icon into the Privacy window. Leave it there for a minute and remove it using the minus button.

Dconf editor window and hard disk activity

Hello,
For quite some time for me, moving the dconf-editor window causes significant hard drive activity. I don't know why, but moving the window makes the hard drive work hard, and cpu load goes up sharply. Does this happen for anyone else? The hard drive continues working for a fair bit after stopping movement of the window. No other window does such a thing...

4GB files on a 32-bit kernel and you run into what I call a bottleneck.
More RAM helps; and using dual RAID0's also allows for more I/O.
2GB left over falls into the anemia category.
The system drive from other experiments, tests, and benchmarks, does a lot more than just sit there and feed up applications.
And just as a fast SSD or 10K drive, or setting those up in RAID0, offers 240-500MB/sec, your memory bandwidth also plays a role.
When working with 2GB files in CS2 and later, arrays for every volume + whatever RAM you can throw at it helps.
Some operations are still single-thread and hold everything up, when you export or save or write to disk RAID makes up for some of that. A file is written out as temp file, old file is renamed, and when done deleted, while the directory and index are updated. And Spotlight rather than wait for things to be done, CAN get in the way while you work.
I don't know the full gist, but back in G3/G4, SCSI arrays made a big enough difference that I splurged on the full setup (two dual channel controllers driving 15K and 10K drives). And without? it was a real tortoise.
If you think 2GB is 'enough' to run OS X alone, let alone Safari, iTunes, Pages or office apps, let alone any pro apps or ones that need some RAM... CS4+ should have an 8GB system.
And the RAM needs of a Mac Pro have just never been as low or comparable to your desktop or laptop system.
But stay with 4GB if you don't mind.

High hard disk activity caused by systemd-tmpfile

Hi
I have home server PC running pure, console Archlinux on it 24/7. It works fine for about 3 years and still do, but after systemd transition I noticed that my server periodically runs systemd-tmpfile daemon which causes intensive and continuous hard disk activity.
My /etc/tmpfiles.d is empty, but here is the content of /usr/lib/tmpfiles.d folder:
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 30 Sep 20 2012 apache.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 30 Jan 13 17:58 console.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 19 Jan 27 06:41 lastlog.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1146 Jan 13 17:58 legacy.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 29 Feb 5 11:09 lirc.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 24 Mar 5 12:57 mpd.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 33 Feb 25 19:41 mysqld.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 27 Jan 27 09:09 nscd.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 51 Feb 25 17:32 samba.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 36 Oct 13 19:30 saslauthd.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 33 Dec 21 16:39 svnserve.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 736 Jan 13 17:58 systemd.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 449 Jan 13 17:58 tmp.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 30 Dec 13 15:24 uuidd.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 622 Jan 13 17:58 x11.conf
My question is how to know which *.conf file causes such a high HDD activity or how to resolve the problem at all?
Last edited by clovenhoof (2013-03-21 18:20:26)

Ok here is what get with "lsof -c systemd-tmpfile" during this activity:
COMMAND PID USER FD TYPE DEVICE SIZE/OFF NODE NAME
systemd-t 1069 root cwd DIR 8,3 4096 2 /
systemd-t 1069 root rtd DIR 8,3 4096 2 /
systemd-t 1069 root txt REG 8,3 59504 290840 /usr/bin/systemd-tmpfiles
systemd-t 1069 root mem REG 8,3 52144 262523 /usr/lib/libnss_files-2.17.so
systemd-t 1069 root mem REG 8,3 138206 262495 /usr/lib/libpthread-2.17.so
systemd-t 1069 root mem REG 8,3 18760 277530 /usr/lib/libattr.so.1.1.0
systemd-t 1069 root mem REG 8,3 2035539 262449 /usr/lib/libc-2.17.so
systemd-t 1069 root mem REG 8,3 31744 262453 /usr/lib/librt-2.17.so
systemd-t 1069 root mem REG 8,3 16776 299945 /usr/lib/libcap.so.2.22
systemd-t 1069 root mem REG 8,3 165436 262497 /usr/lib/ld-2.17.so
systemd-t 1069 root 0r CHR 1,3 0t0 6461 /dev/null
systemd-t 1069 root 1u unix 0xffff8801393df1c0 0t0 23160 socket
systemd-t 1069 root 2u unix 0xffff8801393df1c0 0t0 23160 socket
systemd-t 1069 root 3u unix 0xffff8801393dba80 0t0 23161 socket
systemd-t 1069 root 4r DIR 8,3 9482240 1970431 /var/tmp
systemd-t 1069 root 5r DIR 8,3 4096 793638 /var/tmp/systemd-private-G25Rag

Imposible continue the installation of Snow leopard 10.6 on a 1TB external hard disk, what can I do?

Imposible continue with the installation of Snow leopard 10.6 on a 1TB external hard disk. I did the same last year and I continued working but suddenly appeared the simbol with a folder and a question mark and I know this is a problem so I click in the format option to the hard disk and when I tried to install again Snow Leopard, 'cause I want to recover my backups with Time Machine, I couldn't continue because the installation didn't respond to the click in the Utilities option or to next step > continue . Please, What can I do? I'll wait for your answers. Thank you so much in advance.

Hello Melophage,
It is the original hard drive which should have been erased by the previous owner. The problem is, I cannot access it without any OS installed. Or maybe there is a bootable USB or DVD that can do it ?
Just an indication: when I boot without CD inserted in it, it shows a grey folder icon with a questionmark like this one:
Thank you for your help
PS: Yes, I am interested by the replacement pair of grey installation DVDs for my model. Where can I purchase this ?

Satellite L655-11J - Hard disk activity all the time

Toshiba please I need help
The first run of my laptop I entered my location my name and a password, I install Toshiba updates and Windows 7 updates (the notifications I got) then I noticed the hard drive is active all the time and the laptop is very slow. I tried a lot to restore the original Toshiba image the built in the laptop and I finally did it thinking maybe I did something wrong
The hard disk drive still always active (don't know what reading or writing) no monitoring for any activity the laptop very slow and lot of seeking sounds.
any solution please, I got this problem the first use of it :(

I know it has a guarantee and they will replace it for free, but it was a gift from Saudi Arabia, I'm now in Syria :( I've to wait until on of my relative go back there :D
I went to Toshiba in Syria they charge my 7 $ to tell me the hard is defective although I knew it was so, and I will need to pay 100$ for a replacement so I will wait ;)
thanks all, it was my mistake, it is just I noticed the HDD light always on in windows 7 and it was not on in USB Linux so I thought it was a system problem, I didn't have much time to work on it and make tests :D
I'm sorry again

Brand new 27" iMac with Snow Leopard has constant hard disk activity

I just purchased a new 27" iMac which was an upgrade for my 24" with Leopard. I have used my older machine for a good year and not noticed any hard drive activity when idle.
Now on the new machine with Snow Leopard I constantly get hard disk activty every few seconds.
This will happen from:
1) Restart
2) leaving at login screen
3) loggin in and not running anything.
4) Computer screen in sleep mode.
5) well, all the time really.
I have looked at the activity monitor and can see spikes every 5-10 seconds.
I have turned off all processes possible, watched processes for CPU spikes, etc to no avail.
Is anyone else having the same problem and if so can they suggest a fix? I originally thought it may be something writing to a log every so often but I have no idea what and how to find it.
Using iStat just confirms the activity.
Hope you can help as this is driving me mad!
Message was edited by: RedDwarfUK

RedDwarfUK wrote:
I havent really installed much as well. Here are the list of programs I have installed.
Adium
Firefox
New icons
app cleaner
skype
spotify
chicken of the VNC
GoToMeeting
Cisco VPN Client
Xmarks for safari and firefox
I would start by checking each of these items, making sure you have the latest versions of each & that they are compatible with Snow Leopard. Do the same for any Firefox extensions or any plugins associated with any of these applications. In particular, chicken of the VNC hasn't been updated since 2006 & what little compatibility info I can find for it suggests it supports only Tiger (10.4) & 10.3.9. The Download Xmarks page indicates that it is beta software.
Also note that some of these items may do more than just run as applications. On first run or install, some might install startup or login items, or preference panels that remain in effect even when the application is not running. Check /Library/StartupItems & /System/Library/StartupItems -- both are empty by default, so anything you find in them is suspect. Likewise, check the System Preferences > Accounts > Login Items tab. Anything you find in them that does not appear to come from Apple (like iTunes helper) is suspect. Also check the "Other" category of System Preferences.

Firefox 17.0.1 cache activity on multiple hard disks?

I upgraded OS of my desktop PC from Win 7 to Win 8 (install from scratch).
I also loaded latest version of Firefox 17.0.1
My C system disk is a SSD (therefore no moving parts). I also have a second mechanical hard disk only for data (no software installed on it).
I noticed that; when I scroll up & down in any web page (sometimes just moving mouse over active areas) I hear exactly syncronized activity sound from my mechanical hard disk. So Firefox is inducing some read/write activity on that drive (which normaly it shouldn't have anything to do with it).
I didn't have this with my previous Win 7 - Firefox 16 combination (on exact same PC setup).
I'm only using few extensions (that I've been using on my previous setup as well).
It only happens with Firefox. Scrolling in no other software causes such activity on my secondary mechanical disk.
So I assume that; Firefox is throwing it's cache operation on every single drive it finds available around.
I couldn't find any setting (under Options) to specify location of cache file.
May be it's not the cache file; but it's absolutely caused by Firefox.
I have a virtually silent PC - currently spoiled by Firefox.
Any idea how can I have Firefox run using only the resources of my C (SSD) drive?

Firefox stores all your data — including the cache — under your profile folder, which resides on your system disk.
* [[Profiles]]
If you want a version of Firefox that stores everything in its installation folder, get Firefox Portable. It's designed to be run off a USB Flash drive, but it can also be installed to a local disk. Just make sure to put it somewhere other than the Program Files folder, because over there, Windows UAC would prevent it from writing and modifying files.
* http://portableapps.com/apps/internet/firefox_portable
Or if you prefer doing things the hard way, you can relocate most of Firefox's data as described in this thread:
* [https://support.mozilla.org/questions/944695 How to move any and all disk writes made by firefox to ANOTHER drive?]
As for finding out what Firefox is doing, you can use Process Monitor. Create a filter for Process name: ''firefox.exe'', then open the '''Tools''' menu and choose '''File Summary''' to examine disk activity.
* http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896645.aspx

100% Activity time of hard disk in HP 1000-1140tu .

Hi Everyone
HP 1000-1140tu notebook with 500GB (Toshiba MQ01ABD050 ) , 2GB Ram ddr3 and core i3 processor. This machine has 100% Activity time for hard disk and average response time is always above 1200ms. Mostly system get stucks for 2-3 minutes.
I have re-installed windows 7 and windows 8.1 64bit versions and format the hard drive but issue is not fixed.Also i have updated bios to latest version. Does anybody know about this issue?
I have two suppositions about this issue :
1. Hard drive controlller issue
2. Hard drive connectors issue

Hello @Hp1000TU ,
Welcome to the HP Forums!
I understand you have 100% disk usage on your notebook at all times.
Let's start by optimizing the hardware performance on your notebook by changing the power plan to High Performance.
You can also try running a disk check for corruptions on the drive, and have the computer try to fix them. To do this I suggest booting the notebook into safe mode with command prompt, and then running the following command:
chkdsk /b /v /x C:
Let me know the results of the check disk or if the power plan resolved the issue.
Please click the "Kudos, Thumbs Up" at the bottom of this post if you want to say "Thanks" for helping!
Please click "Accept as Solution" if you feel my post solved your issue, it will help others find the solution.
The Great Deku Tree
I work on behalf of HP.

Program For Logging Hard Disk Activity

Hey Everyone,
I am having an issue with a server in which the Hard disks keep failing, within the last year 3 of them have died.
I am in need of a program that can record logs of the hard drive activity overnight, a period of about 12 hours. This will help us track down at what time the issue is occuring, and then what is causing it. Something similar to the built-in windows hard
disk monitor is task manager, but with the ability to record would be perfect. I have tried other programs but they log in text, and it would take hours of looking through the logs to find any abnormalities
Does anyone know of such a software?

Might give this a go.
DiskMon for Windows v2.01
Regards, Dave Patrick ....
Microsoft Certified Professional
Microsoft MVP [Windows]
Disclaimer: This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties or guarantees , and confers no rights.

How do I copy my time machine back up from a smaller Hard disk to a larger hard disk; so that I can then continue to back up, through Time machine, on the larger hard disk?

I am using time machine for backing up on an external hard disk. This has now become full and every back up results in the deletion of the first back up on the hard drive.
I have bought a larger hard drive now and am trying to copy the back up from the smaller hard drive to the new larger hard drive, using Finder. This is not happening and the message I am getting is
"The volume has the wrong case sensitivity for a back up"

Hello UmeshNB,
Thanks for the question. Based on what you stated, it seems like you are not able to move a backup to another drive. I would recommend that you read this article, it may be able to help you isolate or resolve the issue.
Time Machine: How to transfer backups from the current backup drive to a new backup drive - Apple Support
If it is not formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled), reformat the drive as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) with a GUID partition. If you do not know how, see the steps in this article.
If the drive is formatted as Mac OS Extended but without journaling, OS X may state that "the volume has the wrong case sensitivity" to be used as a back up disk.
Thanks for using Apple Support Communities.
Cheers,
Mario

Hard Disk activity slows machine down

Hi,
I have 4 hard drives in my MacPro and when a disk is very busy regardless of which one, the machine grinds to a halt.
For example, A Parallels VM, which is stored on a separate drive to the boot drive, was flogging the hard disk and my machine ground to a halt until Parallels finished using the drive. It's not the drive the VM was stored on that is problem because I bought a new faster drive and moved the VM there.
I have 4gb of ram
Any ideas?

4GB files on a 32-bit kernel and you run into what I call a bottleneck.
More RAM helps; and using dual RAID0's also allows for more I/O.
2GB left over falls into the anemia category.
The system drive from other experiments, tests, and benchmarks, does a lot more than just sit there and feed up applications.
And just as a fast SSD or 10K drive, or setting those up in RAID0, offers 240-500MB/sec, your memory bandwidth also plays a role.
When working with 2GB files in CS2 and later, arrays for every volume + whatever RAM you can throw at it helps.
Some operations are still single-thread and hold everything up, when you export or save or write to disk RAID makes up for some of that. A file is written out as temp file, old file is renamed, and when done deleted, while the directory and index are updated. And Spotlight rather than wait for things to be done, CAN get in the way while you work.
I don't know the full gist, but back in G3/G4, SCSI arrays made a big enough difference that I splurged on the full setup (two dual channel controllers driving 15K and 10K drives). And without? it was a real tortoise.
If you think 2GB is 'enough' to run OS X alone, let alone Safari, iTunes, Pages or office apps, let alone any pro apps or ones that need some RAM... CS4+ should have an 8GB system.
And the RAM needs of a Mac Pro have just never been as low or comparable to your desktop or laptop system.
But stay with 4GB if you don't mind.

I have a western digital hard disk that I am using with time machine and I wanted to do a recovery of my operating system but when I do it i'm not able to see my time machine savings because it needs a password to be activated what can I do ?

How can I do the recovery of my mac mini with my western digital password protected hard disk (it's my timemachine) when I do the process of recovery everything goes well until I have to choose the date of a previous saving from which I can do the recovery nothing appears.

In the sidebar of a Finder window, select the icon representing your startup volume ("Macintosh HD," unless you gave it a different name.) At the top level of the volume are folders with these names, among others:
Applications
Library
System
Enter Time Machine and select the most recent snapshot, which is behind the frontmost window. Are those folders present in the snapshot?

Hard Disk Continuous Activity

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