How to greatly reduce harddisk grinding noises in Vista

[Abdel Later Masnavi]

Everybody who uses Windows Vista has noticed a lot of harddisk grinding. Here is a lengthy copy-and-paste job describing the main culprits and how to disable them. Although the culprits are doing heavy disk activity, they're not doing heavy CPU activity, and so disabling them mostly delivers peace and quiet, and eliminates a human distraction, but does not substantially improve interactive responsiveness or speed.

SCHEDULED TASKS.

The "System Restore" scheduled task is the most likely culprit when you notice your machine going into a frenzy of disk grinding for around 10 minutes once or twice a day. Microsoft says that by default this scheduled task runs shortly after you first boot the computer and additionally once a day if the computer isn't shut off daily. It's a totally unnecessary task and that's true for almost every user. I am not going to take the time to discuss why its unnecessaryness is total, but a basic thing to know is that the "System Restore" task is creating a backup of the state of the OS so that, if its state were somehow to get messed up later in the day, the OS can be reverted to the state it existed in earlier. The OS independently carries out this backup task whenever you install or uninstall a program; and you're also free to manually ask for a OS backup if you're about to do something that you think might be risky for the OS state. The daily backup is of no use when you notice some misbehavior when you don't know when it was introduced or think it was introduced not recently -- because reverting the state to waybackwhen would destroy good changes made in the meantime. To disable the daily System Restore scheduled task in Computer Management go: TaskScheduler --> TaskSchedulerLibrary --> Microsoft --> Windows --> SystemRestore. Then doubleclick in the UPPER central window pane; then click the "Triggers" tab, and then the "Edit" button in the lower part of that tab. Finally, in the Edit dialog, uncheck the "Enabled" checkbox.

RAC: The RacAgent Task. This task is scheduled to run every hour after you start the computer (and also at intial startup). It causes grinding on the hard disk. Only lasts for 10 seconds but is distracting. Microsoft says "This task is a Microsoft Reliability Analysis task that processes system reliability data." It's unnecessary to analyze the data every hour; it's unnecessary to analyze it until the data is about to be consumed by a human. And the programs that present the data to a human will still have the underlying data anyway. The hourly job can be disabled. Go to "RAC" under TaskSchedulerLibrary -->Microsoft -->Windows. But then, however, in order to see the RacAgent task to disable it, you have to check the item "Show Hidden Tasks" under the top-level View menu (press ALT-v see the view menu).

Windows Defender has a daily scheduled scan that grinds ugly on the harddisk, but it's disabled if you disable Windows Defender altogether, which I personally think is best. For a list of the other scheduled tasks in a default installation of Windows Vista see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/939039.

AUTOMATICALLY STARTED SERVICES.

ReadyBoost, Superfetch, Windows Search, and Windows Defender are automatically started services that cause frequent annoying grinding on the hard disk. As far as I'm concerned the benefits they deliver don't compensate for the annoyance. They are disabled under Services. Also, believe it or not, Windows Update and/or Background Intelligent Transfer Service (which serves Windows Update) causes regular audible disk grinding. They should be disabled in Services as well. (Incidentally both Services and Task Scheduler are accessible from Vista's "Computer Management" program, which is launchable by, among other ways, right-clicking on "Computer" in file Explorer and then picking the "Manage" item in the context menu.)

For anyone who's going to disable ReadyBoost it's also a good idea to disable the related but different ReadyBoot. According to Microsoft, ReadyBoot can reduce booting time by up to 20%. But the price paid is harddisk writing noise a while after the machine has been started and is supposed to be all yours. You can observe a 20 megabyte file created by ReadyBoot on your boot disk at C:\Windows\prefetch\ReadyBoot\ReadyBoot.etl and you can observe the cost of writing to that file by watching disk usage in Vista's Resource Monitor program not long after startup. I notice no change in boot time after disabling ReadyBoot, ReadyBoost and Superfetch. Nor any change in system performance overall, except for the pleasant reduction in disk activity.

Here's how to disable ReadyBoot. Launch the "Reliability and Performance Monitor" program (under "System Tools" inside "Computer Management"; or via any of the other routes to launch this program). Then on the lefthand side of your screen click "Data Collector Sets", and underneath that heading click "Startup Event Trace Sessions". Now on your righthand side you'll see a list that includes ReadyBoot, and you'll see the word 'enabled' beside the word 'Readyboot'. Double clicking the list item brings up the ReadyBoot Properties dialog. This dialog has a number of tabs. Pick the "Trace Session" tab. Finally, uncheck the "Enabled" checkbox on that tab.

WINDOWS MEDIA PLAYER.

I get a substantial reduction in disk grinding noises by a policy of never using Windows Media Player. There are several free programs on the Net that are far better than Windows Media Player in regard to disk accesses and in other ways too, and not inferior to it in any way. Windows Media Player generates ceaseless disk write activity when idle (and when playing too). You can verify that by monitoring you computer's disk activity by clicking the the "Reliability and Performance Monitor" tab in the "Computer Management" program (a.k.a. the Resource Monitor). Here's more details about how I monitored this activity, since it's not very straightforward.

I launched Windows Media Player and gave it a minute to settle down (there's a flurry of disk activity initially). Then, without playing any music I looked at the ongoing display of disk activity in the Resource Monitor; or else played music for a while and then stoped the playing; or else just played the music. The Resource Monitor shows that, regardless of whether music is playing or not, there's constant and interminable disk writing activity (no reading) at an IO priority of Normal, writing to the following files by the System process (as distinct from the Media Player process):

NTUSER.DAT (320 KB per minute)
$LogFile (NTFS Volume Log) (210 KB per minute)
ntuser.dat.LOG1 (90 KB per minute)
$Mft (NTFS Master File Table) (35 KB per minute)
C:\Users\MyUserName (25 KB per minute)

If I now exit from Windows Media Player, those five constant disk writes terminate after about a minute (various other disk writes are being done by the System process while that minute is passing).

If I go through the same steps as above using the Winamp music player I don't see any of the above files being written, nor any other disk writes on my machine (I have disabled LastAlive, see below). The only thing I see is the read from the MP3 file, once things have had a minute to settle down.

Windows Media Player by default is launched with a "prefetch" parameter. Suspecting some sort of dumb prefetching to be the problem, I launched it with no "prefetch" parameter, but found it made no difference.

It may be said that Windows Media Player's constant disk writing, whatever it's supposed to be for, is harmless because it's only around 650 KB per minute, which is a very small burden on the disk.

But six months ago I was noticing a greater burden or more exactly annoying audible disk grinding about once a minute clearly attributable to Windows Media Player. I disabled loads of stuff in Vista around that time. When multiple independent processes use the disk around the same time, there's more noise as the disk head is repositioned.

Another near constant disk writing activity in Vista is associated with the two small files lastalive0.dat and lastalive1.dat. See How to disable hard disk thrashing with Vista for details on what they are and how to disable them.

Unfortunately, Vista is still producing stuff I don't want that I can't disable because Vista hasn't been well designed enough, and because the documentation is too poor. My computer is still generating log files that I don't want generated and that will never be used, including NTUSER.DAT, SCM.EVM, BootCKCL.etl, and so on. I'm seriously thinking of switching to Linux.

[swarmer]

Originally Posted by Abdel Later Masnavi

The "System Restore" scheduled task is the most likely culprit when you notice your machine going into a frenzy of disk grinding for around 10 minutes once or twice a day. Microsoft says that by default this scheduled task runs shortly after you first boot the computer and additionally once a day if the computer isn't shut off daily. It's a totally unnecessary task and that's true for almost every user. I am not going to take the time to discuss why its unnecessaryness is total, but a basic thing to know is that the "System Restore" task is creating a backup of the state of the OS so that, if its state were somehow to get messed up later in the day, the OS can be reverted to the state it existed in earlier.

If you look in the Task Scheduler, under the System Restore task, you can see in the Conditions tab that by default the task only runs if the computer has been idle for 10 minutes. The History tab shows that on my machine, the task always completes within 1 minute of starting. So... not a big problem in my opinion.

Regarding the larger issue of hard disk thrashing/grinding... I don't know what was causing it, but upgrading to SP1 fixed it for me.

The only thing you mentioned that I agree is bothersome is Defender. (Well, to be fair, I haven't really looked into RAC or WMP11.) I still keep Defender on, but I changed the scans from daily to weekly. Every day really was a bit much.

EDIT: I don't even have a RACAgent Task on mine. There's a RAC folder in Task Scheduler, but it has no tasks. I wonder why...

Also... lastalive0.dat and lastalive1.dat are technically still used in SP1, but they're not accessed anywhere near as often.

[orev]

Don't do any of this stuff.

You are telling people to disable huge parts of the system, many of which are the reason Vista exists. You are also telling people to disable services that give critical safety in the event of a problem, all for what? Hard drives these days are almost silent already.

[lowlymarine]

Good god don't disable all of those! SuperFetch may cause a lot of hard disk grinding but turning it off will noticeably cripple system performance. And if you disable the WU and BITS services you won't be able to use Windows Update, even manually, without turning them on again.

[Just Lou]

ReadyBoost, Superfetch, Windows Search, and Windows Defender are all useless IMO. Since disabling all of them, my system runs just as well as my XP systems, and I'm finally satisfied running Vista.
This is JMO. YMMV.

[ScuderiaConchiglia]

Ahhh yes, another newbie tweaker, who knows more about operating systems than the folks who make their living writing them.

These are some of the STUPIDEST suggestions posted over and over again. Yep go ahead turn off WU and BITS. Good luck gettting ANY updates after you do. Yep, Superfetch and Windows search are just useless, turn em off. Then wonder why the hell applications take longer to load and why you can't find a document you created last year that mentioned XYZ in it. Yep, great suggestions. Oh, of course jettison Windows Defender, hell why not turn off your firewall and antivirus while your at it. They are just as useless and do nothing but grind your hard drive. Never mind the fact that your hard drive is DESIGNED to be "ground". Have you ever seen how much use a drive in a server gets? And the technology is virtually the same as what we have in our non-server machines when it comes to the wear and tear aspcets of the drive.

Unfortunately, Vista is still producing stuff I don't want that I can't disable because Vista hasn't been well designed enough, and because the documentation is too poor. My computer is still generating log files that I don't want generated and that will never be used, including NTUSER.DAT, SCM.EVM, BootCKCL.etl, and so on. I'm seriously thinking of switching to Linux.

Good idea please do, and take your "advice" with you.

Gary

[Just Lou]

OK. OK. Superfetch is the best of the best. My applications now take 1.1 seconds to load instead of the loooong 1.3 seconds it would normally take. I'll just learn to ignore the sites and sounds of my HD. I'm sure it's not affecting my system's performance in anyway. Oh, and Windows Defender. That's a great product too. Much better than any of the 3rd party software I use. All those years running XP without out, I don't know how my systems survived.




....the original poster is over the top though.

[masterchef341]

using windows defender is pretty ridiculous. i would also recommend getting 3rd party software for that.

[rsly33]

Originally Posted by Just Lou

OK. OK. Superfetch is the best of the best. My applications now take 1.1 seconds to load instead of the loooong 1.3 seconds it would normally take. I'll just learn to ignore the sites and sounds of of HD.

Superfetch is prefetching programs into the RAM. The old way (your way) is reading directly off the harddrive. "Sites and sounds of the HD" as you call it only happens with your chosen method of opening programs.

And Im sure you got a huge performance boost from turning it off too

[Shyster1]

Originally Posted by rsly33

Superfetch is prefetching programs into the RAM. The old way (your way) is reading directly off the harddrive. "Sites and sounds of the HD" as you call it only happens with your chosen method of opening programs.

And Im sure you got a huge performance boost from turning it off too

So, are you saying that if I use superfetch my programs/data won't have to be read off the disk at all?