Why is my hard drive so busy (process hacker)

Ever wonder why your hard drive is always busy reading or writing something that slow down your Windows dramatically even you're doing nothing? I do, and it bothers me all the time because my Windows VISTA running on a E8200, 4G memory hardware is always writing something I don't know making endless clicking sound even after screen saver activated.

An always busy hard drives is really annoying. It can be a windows service, a virus, or in most cases the windows memory swapping who make your hard drive busy. Anyway, it's always good to know who's making it busy. Isn't it?

A quick search led me to a Taiwanese blog (http://twchuck.blogspot.com/2010/11/blog-post_19.html) which talking about the same thing (busy hard drive) and introduces a nice tool call "process hacker" (from sourceforge). I had it working on my computer in 3 minutes and the result came out so great!


Download the great tool from sourceforget here:
Process Hacker

No installation required. Just extract the folder you need to a place where files can be excuted (x64 folder for 64bit Windows, x86 for non-64bits, choose one that fits your Windows) and run "ProcessHacker.exe". This program will analyze and show you lots of useful information. Down below is a snapshop of my Windows VISTA. The task with highest "I/O Total" should be the one who bother your hard drive most. Ignore the process who bursts up and go down in 1 second. The ones who keep high I/O for at least 5 seconds are the real bad guys.

You can right click on the process you don't like to "terminate" it or even "terminate tree" to kill related processes at once. I made this post to help you find clues to an annoying symptom, not to ruin your unsaved work so be sure that you know what you're doing. Killing something you don't know may cause system unstable!

Cheers!

(ignore those Chinese characters since I have no way to change them to English in a Chinese Windows)