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yet another Microsoft blogger

# Thursday, March 01, 2007

Find out why your hard disk is blinky all the time

Now that I am running Vista on all my machines I'm much more aware of all the hard drive clanking going on around me. On XP my machines would eventually get to a "resting point" where the machine would stop doing stuff.

On Vista it seems like "stuff" is always happening. I'm beginning to wonder just how much Mean Time To Failure is a number we might pay attention to for hard disks.

Anyway, my buddy Mike Fullerton posted a nice entry on how to find out just what the heck your hard drive is doing.

The big offenders on my computer?

  1. FolderShare
  2. Windows Live OneCare
  3. SearchIndexer
  4. Sidebar
  5. Outlook

#3 and #5 seem to tag team together in a WWE Smackdown on the hard drive.

 

Thursday, March 01, 2007 11:36:02 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
I had the same problem when i upgraded to Vista. My system has 512mb ram. Plus, the system was so slow i couldn't deal with it! I finally replaced one of my 256mb chips with a 1gb chip - so now i have 1.2gb ram, and WOW(no pun intended!)! What a difference! The speed has been changed, and my hard drive light is hardly ever on, unless i'm actually opening a program, or doing something.
Those 5 culprit programs - they are always active on my system, and i'm still not having a problem w/ disk usage!
Its amazing what some RAM can do - reminds me of when XP went from SP1 to SP2 - if you upgraded to SP2 w/ 256mb ram, you had the same issue - upping it to 512 completely cleared up the issue.
Andrew
Friday, March 02, 2007 11:03:46 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
Actually the disk churn, while annoying, should have little effect on drive live. The most likely cause of failure is going to be overheating. Check out Google Lab's interesting document on drive failure. They found, after manufacturer defects, heat, not use, is the most likely cause of drive failure.

It's an interesting read (thought they don't say who makes bad drives. Check it out: http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf
Friday, November 23, 2007 8:03:55 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
Reeves, to quote that PDF,

"The figure shows that failures do not increase when the average temperature increases. In fact, there is a clear trend showing that lower temperatures are associated with higher failure rates. Only at very high temperatures is there a slight reversal of this trend."
Greg
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