# Why is the HD running and running



## watcher (Sep 4, 2006)

I have Vista on this machine and I have noticed that it seems that a lot of the times when I'm just sitting here the HD is spinning (I can hear it and see the little light blinking). It spins and spins and spins. Paranoid little old me has to wonder if my machine might have caught a bug but I have a virus scanner that updates and runs once a day (I told you I was paranoid) and I do a SpyBot and/or AdAware scan at least once a week. 

Is it normal for Vista to spin the HD a lot or should I be worried? Might it be a great plot to wear out my HD and force me to buy another sooner!!! Ok, that might be too paranoid for even for me


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## Gary in ohio (May 11, 2002)

Unless your on a laptop your hard drive never stops spinning, It may spin at different speeds but its spinning. The light is not disk spinning but disk access. Your virus checker and many tools will touch the HD and cause it to appear to blink.


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## watcher (Sep 4, 2006)

Gary in ohio said:


> Unless your on a laptop your hard drive never stops spinning, It may spin at different speeds but its spinning. The light is not disk spinning but disk access. Your virus checker and many tools will touch the HD and cause it to appear to blink.


This is a desktop and right now if the HD is spinning is is so slow that I can't hear it and the light is 'flickering'. But there are times when I hear it and the light is almost steady. I if I'm doing something, saving a program or some such, I understand why but when its sitting there with me away or when I'm working on a txt doc I don't get it. 

I know since XP Windoze has had some things it does while the system was 'idle' but Vista seems to do more. Just what is it doing?


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## OntarioMan (Feb 11, 2007)

How much memory does your system have?


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## Nevada (Sep 9, 2004)

watcher said:


> I have Vista on this machine and I have noticed that it seems that a lot of the times when I'm just sitting here the HD is spinning (I can hear it and see the little light blinking). It spins and spins and spins. Paranoid little old me has to wonder if my machine might have caught a bug but I have a virus scanner that updates and runs once a day (I told you I was paranoid) and I do a SpyBot and/or AdAware scan at least once a week.
> 
> Is it normal for Vista to spin the HD a lot or should I be worried? Might it be a great plot to wear out my HD and force me to buy another sooner!!! Ok, that might be too paranoid for even for me


First, are you sure it's your hard drive? The sound a hard drive makes when it's accessing data sounds more like static than spinning. However, your CD drive does make spinning sounds. Check to see if there's a CD/DVD in your optical drive.

If it turns out that it's your hard drive, that's not unusual. Antivirus programs can be scheduled to scan your machine for viruses periodically, and that can take quite a bit of time (an hour isn't unusual). By default, AVG Antivirus scans your machine every day, but that feature can be disabled.


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## gccrook (Nov 21, 2003)

Windows Xp and Vista use CPU idle time to do hard drive cleanup similar to using defrag before. There is some file system optimization happening in the background when you are not using the system.


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## gccrook (Nov 21, 2003)

Here is a clip from ask-leo.com



> Why, when I'm doing nothing at all, will my hard disk suddenly start thrashing?
> 
> It could be for many reasons. The most common are anti-virus tools or the system indexing service if it's enabled.
> 
> To find out what's happening on your system, we'll use a filesystem monitoring tool. Download FileMon from the folks over at Sysinternals.com. It works on Windows 95 or later, and Windows NT 4 or later.


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