Idle Hard Disk Activity

[Zaafir]

Hello friends,

I would like to know how much if any activity is normal, with the system just "sitting" ?What makes these momentary disk accesses ? What is the part to long term wear 'n tear from this "idle" process

thanks for any thoughts?

[SecRecy]

When your computer is idle, Windows performs various housekeeping activities. One such activity is compacting the virtual memory swap file after one minute of inactivity. This is done to conserve disk space.You can confirm that this is what is happening by running the System Monitor tool and monitoring the Swapfile Size item in the Memory Manager category. When the hard disk activity is finished, you should see the Swapfile Size file decrease.

[Russell]

Chance that the hard drive may not be working at its normal speed,hanging up or slowing down. Or has quit. My computer took 20 min. to boot the other day.I was trying to figure out the HDD activity indicator light, and it would stay on, and not suddenly blinking.Mechanical devices do have issues.Harddrive venders have software for download for testing HDD.

[Joshua]

Basically, if Windows was designed properly then a system with 4GB of memory running XP, would be able to spin down the hard drive and let it stay asleep for days if no new applications were ran or no new data I/O was logically necessary to the disk subsystem.Instead, windows is a bloated, arrogant pig of an operating system, deciding for us what we need it to do. During the Win95 era, I often had the hard drive spin down. During WinXP, with over 20X the memory and doing absolutely nothing but letting a system idle, it never spins down. Severe design flaw, because the best answer is not to assume an infinite amount of resources even if "resource" means hard drive activity, rather the best design is do nothing until directly commanded to do so.