What's this process?

[forumjoe]

One of the remaining problems I have with my newly-built P55-US3L is one that I've briefly mentioned in other postings here, namely that of constant and very regular accesses to the hard drive. The latter is never in an idle state, and clearly something is amiss. Frankly, the HDD is going to rapidly wear out unless it's fixed. Thus far, I've been unable to determine the process causing it.

I'm able to observe these accesses by means of the "HDD activity" LED on the the PC's casing. The accesses are at a constant rate of about one every three-quarters of a second, so it's as though something is polling the HDD, and maybe other resources on the machine. During bootup, or when the BIOS has been opened, these accesses do not occur; it's only once Windows has booted that they start.

Something else I'm getting is random accesses to the floppy-disc drive. Quite often, a spurious access to the FDD will occur when I'm clicking the USB mouse, so there may be a connection of this with the otherwise totally random nature of the FDD accesses, and also the regular HDD accesses. At other times, the FDD accesses (you can hear the FDD mechanism whirr as it's accessed) occur of their own accord. The cable from the board to the FDD was thoroughly checked out by me some time ago and I've successfully used floppy discs in the drive.

I've no reason to think that the HDD problem is caused by any legitimate background process. For instance, the accesses remain even if I disable my antivirus and software firewall.

I've had a look in Windows's Task Manager. If, in turn, I highlight each process listed there, the highlight pulses in sympathy with the HDD accesses, so clearly the accesses are interrupting these legitimate processes. But I'm loath to disable each process in that list to try to pinpoint the cause, even temporarily, as Windows advises against it.

Note that I've not installed a driver for the GSATA chip, as I'm not using RAID. So, I'm wondering if I was correct to not install the driver, even so. Could the BIOS be constantly searching for a driver for this chip? Does part of the GSATA chip handle mouse and floppy-disc operations, ie. I/O on the H55's LPC bus? (See block schematic in the user's manual).

My gut feeling is that the HDD accessing is somehow linked to the random FDD accesses.

Anyone else noticed anything like this?

[Searcher1]

Hi forumjoe

In no particular order:-

Windows Indexing service ~ this AFAIK used be "on" by default by can be 'turned off'.

Norton AV or Internet Security ~ a real resource hog the uninstalling of which is a pain of monumnetal proportions.

A TSR program such as a Digital Asset Management (DAM) program - I had this with IDImager but an update or two later and the floppy seeking and etc was gone.  Having said that you did say you had checked 'running processes'

[forumjoe]

I've never properly understood what the Indexing service does and whether turning it off could have any detrimental effect. Would you turn it off in Services?

I'm not using Norton AV or IS. I'm using Windows's security package, which is lean and is supposed to be quite clean. I've tested to see if turning it off has any effect on this regular accessing and there's no sign whatever of any improvement. I'm not quite so sure, however, of its involvement in the random FDD accesses. Given that, for the moment, I've set the AV up to not scan removeable drives at all, my guess is that it's not involved.

What kinds of programs run DAM?

BTW, I said I'd 'looked at' the running background processes. However, I didn't stop any to see if they were the cause.

I've certainly never encountered this on any previous PC of mine. For instance, it never took place on my previous one, and I'm using exactly the same edition of Windows, with almost exactly the same updates and service packs. I'm using just three apps, of which one is new. As far as I can make out, this regular accessing of the hard drive was there long before these apps were installed, so I suspect it's something to do with the new architecture of the machine, and that it's more likely to be a motherboard driver or BIOS bug.

[Dark Mantis]

I have only come across this type of problem before where it was Windows indexing the drive. It was a "feature" Micro$oft brought in with Vista. PITA!

[forumjoe]

DM,

By that, do you mean that Microsoft FIRST introduced it with Vista, or are you suggesting instead that it should be unique to Vista? As you may know, I'm using WinXP, not Vista.

What exactly do you mean by 'indexing the drive'?

I can't imagine that anything would be designed to access the hard drive literally all the time at this rate. A quick calciulation shows that, if during any one day you had the PC on for just 3 hrs, over 20,000 of these accesses would be made. No hard drive is meant to take that sort of usage.

[Dark Mantis]

As far as I'm aware it was first introduced with Vista and caused a lot of problems with overheads etc and is still used but more sensibly in Win7. I don't think it was ever retro fitted to XP.