Windows 7 Resource Monitor has one of my Hds always at 100% active

[Eric B]

I keep putting the drive offline because im wary of having it always active. It may have something to do with avast antivirus because thats the image thats listed next to the files in those drives. I checked with avast and it doesnt appear to be running any scans and theres no way I can find to have it skip that drive. Also when I put the drive back online the activity is at 0 but eventually goes back to 100% and I can hear the drive activity. Would love some feedback on what I can try to do to resolve this. Thanks

 

[Joe S]

Are you using any automatic backup software? They can be real resource hogs especially Smartware from WD.
Joe

 

[Eric B]

no automatic backups

update: its now back to 100% active about an hour after putting it back online and the image it says is SYSTEM so im not sure what its doing. It seems to be mostly focused on 1 folder with 60 gigs in it. Im moving that folder to another HD to see what happens.

 

[Saltgrass]

You could remove it from indexing. Are you doing any media streaming, 60 gigs is a large folder?

If you have System checked for filtering in the Resource Monitor, can you tie it to any services or utilities if you look at the CPU usage? Click the top of the CPU column to set the most or least used at the top.

 

[Eric B]

cpu usage is very low i have a i-7 2600K. No media streaming that folder is just some files I copied from an old hard drive to clear it out. Indexing is already off.

After moving that folder its still at 100% and just using different folders. Most of them under image say SYSTEM and PID 4 if that means anything.

 

[Saltgrass]

The 4 is normally the System process ID. But something is causing it to do the work.

After moving that folder its still at 100% and just using different folders.

What is at 100%, the same folder after being moved is still being looked at or the drive itself?

When you look at Resource Monitor and set the CPU usage as priority, what is showing up as using the CPU. Keep in mind, a 0 does not always mean 0, it just does not show numbers less than that.

In resource Monitor, under Disk Activity, if it is really running 100% of the time, you must be showing some file that is showing a very large number of B/sec. Look through some of the other displays to see if anything shows up with a large amount of activity. If there are many files showing activity are they in the same folder?

Try watching the activity and see what changes when you take the disk offline...

Edit: I will add, if I check Resource Monitor for Disk Activity, every listed file in on the C: partition, and I do have other partitions and a second drive. If you are showing files on another drive, you should be able to pin them down. The system process has around 160 threads running in it. There is software that will break that out if you decide to try.

 

[Joe S]

I had problem with AVG some years ago and it was being caused by it's treatment of a download of Windows SP2 for XP. Did you copy the old OS by chance? Do you have any virtual PC on that drive? I was wondering if it was homing in on files from another AV. It has been known to happen.
Joe

 

[Eric B]

Well there is a windows install on that drive that im not using, but it seems to just continuously scan all the files on that drive and I cant find a way to get it to stop. When I put that drive offline then a different drive went to 100% usage. I put it back online and then that one went to 100% and the other one went back to very little activity. It seems like its an issue with avast.

 

[Drew]

Eric,

Try switching from Avast to MSE. I used Avast for years for myself & clients but, now, use MSE, exclusively & no problems @ all.

Drew

 

[Joe S]

See if you can exclude that old Windows install from scans. With Avast I excluded my VMs and virtual HD with Windows 8 on it.
Joe

 

[Drew]

See how we agree?? Seriously, take our advice... use MSE Microsoft Security Essentials - Free Antivirus for Windows as your, as 'THE' security platform... it does a really fine job @ what it's designed to do, does that job very well AND it plays extremely well w/ the other kids if, you get my drift.

Think of MSE, Malwarebytes & CCleaner as the 3 Musketeers.

Cheers,
Drew

 

[Eric B]

SOLVED:I think I figured it out. I went to manually scan something and when it was done the window showed that the screen saver scan was running even though my screen saver was off and asked if I wanted to stop it so I did. I have since deselected that in my screen saver menu and so far that seems to have stopped all the activity on my hard drive. Thanks for all who tried to help me.