Topic: Hard drive running non stop

[Den]

My son phoned me this evening and stated that his hard drive was running all the while and keeps on even if he does a reboot. He is running windos 7 with MS Esentials and has tried cleaning out with CC Cleaner but what ever he does it carries on doing it. Could this be a hard drive failing or what. HELP.

[Simon]

Oh, he's tried a reboot. 

Does it do it if he starts in safe mode, Den?

[Clive]

Why not call up Windows Task Manager/processes and see what's causing it to run constantly.  It may be nothing more sinister than a large windows update.  Rebooting will merely restart the process all over again. 

[sam]

If its an update you'll probably be right Clive, but I didn't think it did that.

Indeed the task manager should tell you nicely what task is using up all of his HD.

How much RAM has he got, is any of the tasks using lots of RAM. If its losing lots of RAM then the machine will using the hard drive as SWAP space and will be constantly reading and writing to the disk. This is much slower than using RAM and so not only will the disk io be high it will also cause a noticeable performance loss (well much less so in the case of a RAIDED or solid state system).