Detect what process is thrashing your hard drive

Every once in a while you notice that your hard drive is working extra hard for what seems like no reason. A background process has taken your hard drive hostage, forcing it to thrash loudly as it struggles to keep up with the high rate of reads and writes. Your computer responds slowly as the process overloads the physical limitations of your drive. What are you to do?

The solution is simple, although a little tricky at times: identify and stop the process that is killing your drive. There are two methods and tools that you can use to identify the process.

Method 1

1. Click on the Start Button and key in Reliability. Click on the Reliability and Performance Monitor shortcut.
2. On the main screen click on the Disk section down arrow to see a list of all processes and the files they are writing or reading from your drives.
3. Click on the Read or Write headings to sort all disk operations to identify which process and file is currently using the disk the most.

Method 2

1. Visit Microsoft’s Sysinternals web site and download Process Explorer.
2. After you have started Process Explorer, click on the View menubar item and then Select Columns.
3. Click on the Process Performance tab and check:
* I/O Reads
* I/O Read Bytes
* I/O Writes
* I/O Write Bytes
4. Hit OK.
5. You will now see the new columns listed for each process. To identify what process is killing your hard drive, just look for the process with the highest number of Reads or Bytes.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 18th, 2007 at 7:09 am and is filed under Computer, Hardware. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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