Hard Drive Grinding – Common Causes and Solutions

hard driveperformancewindows

My windows (XP) hard drive grinds a lot and it negatively affects the performance of other applications.

I have plenty of RAM and have already verified that this hard drive activity is not page file swap activity. I have also already looked in task manager to see if only one or two processes are active but I have found no smoking gun.

What tools can I use to directly determine what application or feature of the OS is causing the hard drive activity?

Best Answer

Process Explorer. Make sure you show the columns that contain the I/O activity.

Sometimes you may see a process running multiple services that causes the activity. In that case, it requires a bit of guesswork.

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