Detecting programs that utilize the hard disk.

[Aguiluz]

My hard drive never stops spinning even on idle. It seems that one/some program(s) are using the hard drive every now and then.

When I listen, I could hear the head moving constantly, going "plonk....plonk....plonk..." at a regular and predictable pattern.

Since this may shorten the drive (and battery's) life, how do I detect programs that use the HD?

[Skyone]

Vista/7 have a few tools that could help: resmon.exe and perfmon.exe. Don't know if XP has an equivalent.

[bicostp]

There might be a similar program in the Sysinternals collection:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysi ... fault.aspx

I don't think you'll find a laptop that really shuts its hard drive down and runs a modern OS. Especially not Windows, because no matter what it has to have and use a swap file.

My old Powerbooks can completely shut the hard drive off, but that's because under System 7.5, virtual memory was completely optional and you could run from RAM. (Heck you could even boot and work from RAM with a RAM Disk if you had enough to spare.)