How to disable hard disk thrashing with Vista

My disk doesn't thrash at all. Typing this right now the HD light hasn't flashed once. I'm on Vista Home Premium if that matters.

 

Yeah. I found a number of those less-than-definitive "answers", too.

 

AKAJohnDoe wrote: "Has anyone found the definitive answer to what that pair of lastalive files actually are and do?" Yes. LastAlive writes a timestamp and a small amount of other system info to the harddisk on a very frequent, regular basis, with the consequence that if the system should die a sudden catastrophic death, some context information about the catastrophy will be available when the system is rebooted. You can find more info about this on the Internet -- including in Microsoft's official documentation believe it or not -- by searching for the words LastAliveStamp and TimeStampInterval. See e.g. http://technet2.microsoft.com/windowsserver/en/library/5c6e30b2-6803-418d-a7b5-e4eb79323db51033.mspx

TimeStampInterval is a registry key that defines how often the LastAlive info is written to the harddisk. It is at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Reliability\
By changing the registry value of TimeStampInterval to zero, you will stop the writes to the lastalive0.dat and lastalive1.dat files on your harddisk. I've done this on my machine. I believe it has no effect on performance one way or another because the amout of data that's being written to the disk by LastAlive is too small, even though it's being written very repeatedly. But as far as I'm concerned it's always nice to eliminate unnecessary disk activity, even when the benefit is imperceptible.

Now I wish I could find out how to eliminate the more heavy unnecessary disk writes that Ari_M was talking about... NTUSER.DAT, USRCLASS.DAT, $LogFile (NTFS Volume Log), etc.

 

I HAVE FOUND THE ACTUAL CAUSE! I am positive this is what has been causing the intense disk activity on my IBM laptop with Vista Business with SP1 and on my desktop with Vista Home Premium with SP1. It is task scheduler but more specifically it is System Restore. Go to your start meu, all programs, accessories, system tools, and then task scheduler. In task scheduler drop down task scheduler library, microsoft, windows, system restore. Now from here check the "triggers". It is scheduled to run on every system startup and every day at 12:00 am. Then check "conditions" and you'll see task scheduler will queue the system restore task on these triggers to run once the computer has been idle for 10 minutes. This is the cause, it's your choice how you want to change this from happening. You can turn system restore off, you can just delete this task completely and run system restore manually, or (I haven't tried this yet though so I don't know how well this will work but) within the task if you double click on the task "SR" you will get a new window, go to conditions, and under where it says "Start the task only if the computer is idle for:" there is a check box that says "Stop if the computer ceases to be idle". Check this box and the hard drive activity should stop if you start working on your computer again. Or you can just delete one of the triggers or you can change the idle time to longer than 10 minutes. Please post and let me know if that fixes your excessive hard drive access issue.

 

Turning off SuperFetch pretty much stopped all of my HD thrashing -- it's been off for months and I haven't missed it. I'm on Vista32 Premium with SP1 loaded.

 

I had no use for System Restore, nor for Indexing, so they were both turned off/disabled long ago on my PC. Fetching stayed on.

 

Some have disable superfetch to stopped the HDD thrashing.

 

After I did the initial clean install, I disabled all of the usual suspects and Vista went through the process of adjusting to my habits. I had absolutely no disk thrashing after that (took about 1 week). Then, about two weeks ago, I noticed that I was having the problem every 10 or so seconds. I can't do anything about it, though. I can't seem to make it stop no matter what I do. My habits have remained the same, so I don't understand why this is occurring now.

 

AKA, are there any cons to turning system restore off completely? I have Acronis and I use that to back my system up every few days. Is that enough? I really think I would like to disable system restore, but I'm kinda afraid to do that at this point.

 

You know, it really depends upon your backup/restore strategy. If you have none, you should definitely leave Windows Restore on. If you do not regularly (i.e.: at least every 30 days) validate that your backup can in fact be restored, then you should also leave Windows Restore turned on.

Myself, I have a backup strategy and validate it regularly.