[Techtalk] periodic loud hard drive noise

[Little Girl]

Hey there,

Carla Schroder wrote:

> On Friday 15 January 2010 04:07:36 am Ande's Help .Net Info wrote:
> > It sounds as if the hard drive could be getting indexed.  Some
> > hard drives are louder than others when being searched by the
> > system for file indexing.
> 
> That's a good thought. Even so, it shouldn't be that noisy. If it
> is the old IDE drive I'm going to decommission it. Maybe at the
> shooting range :)

There are two other possibilities. The first is worst-case scenario,
being that something's broken (i.e.: Gremlins!).

The other is that something you have running is using your computer. What software do you have running when this happens? I know
you said the machine is idle at the time, but if you have something
running (in a presumed idle state), it could be doing something.

Just for an example, the Skype program uses your system resources to
facilitate conversations by any/all of its users. This means that
even if you're not actively chatting on Skype, if the program
is open, it can be using your computer for other people's chats.

I realize that if Skype (or any program that shares resources among
its users) were to blame, it would probably be using your processor
and bandwidth rather than your hard drive, but maybe sleuthing along
this line could turn up the actual culprit.

-- 
Little Girl

There is no spoon.