Hard drive activations

Gneez

Hey all I have this problem for a year or so, I have a large tower, 6 hard drives but I only keep 3 plugged in at a time, I have them set to spin down when not in use but for some reason every time I use an .exe or use my browser they all spin up, there is nothing installed on these drives they are just storage but something in the registry has it in its head to spin them all up every time I use a program.

Start a game - they spin up
Start media player - they spin up
Start my browser (firefox and chrome both) - they spin up

this is really annoying as I'm putting a lot of wear on the drives with the constant spin ups from standy as my PC is on 24 hours a day, I've switched off file indexing but to no avail, and I've changed the drive's path letter several times which didnt help, I've also run MSconfig and my OS boots up very lean I have everything non-essential unchecked.

Any idea what's causing this? its wrecking my head.

Capt'n Midnight

don't forget that hard drives are like light bulbs they only have a limited number of on/off's and so like light bulbs they may actually live longer when turned on


at a command prompt type SET to see if anything points at this drive

you could search the registry for reference to or whatever

it could also just be one of those windows things

is your anti virus checking stuff ?- try again in safe mode too

Alun

You could try the file activity monitoring part of Process Monitor (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896645.aspx) and put a filter on to only display items that contain the drive letter you've allocated. That'll at least tell you what process is accessing them.

Gneez

Thanks for the good advice so far

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

don't forget that hard drives are like light bulbs they only have a limited number of on/off's and so like light bulbs they may actually live longer when turned on


at a command prompt type SET to see if anything points at this drive

you could search the registry for reference to or whatever

it could also just be one of those windows things

is your anti virus checking stuff ?- try again in safe mode too

SET didn't point to either drive N:\ and M:\ and there was no reference to either in registry, the antivirus thing I was thinking about too it could be that, I've got avast and had a look to see if people with avast had similar issues and couldn't find any.

Alun wrote: »

You could try the file activity monitoring part of Process Monitor (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896645.aspx) and put a filter on to only display items that contain the drive letter you've allocated. That'll at least tell you what process is accessing them.

I'll do this have it running now will fiddle about with it and see if it can tell me who the culprit is

Gneez

Alun wrote: »

You could try the file activity monitoring part of Process Monitor (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896645.aspx) and put a filter on to only display items that contain the drive letter you've allocated. That'll at least tell you what process is accessing them.

how do I set up the filter? I can't figure it out, this is what I've been trying.

Alun

You're on the right track, but change the "is" to "contains" and to be 100% safe change "M:\" to just "M:" (ditto for N:) and you should hopefully see something.

Gneez

Well I've found the culprit its svchost.exe



When I open irfanview picture viewer svchost.exe query's some file's on n:\ and when I open media player it query's files on m:\

So any idea how to stop it doing this?

Gneez

I used Process Explorer here to see what was using svchost.exe as a shell and it points to my AvastSvc.exe anti-virus as a possible culprit I'm going to remove it and use another AV, anyone got a good suggestion for a free AV besides AVG (avg let me down in the past)

Alun

Gneez wrote: »

Well I've found the culprit its svchost.exe



When I open irfanview picture viewer svchost.exe query's some file's on n:\ and when I open media player it query's files on m:\

So any idea how to stop it doing this?

Well you seem to have your music on M:, and I guess Media Player is just scanning it to see if you've added any new "meeja" to the library .. I think there's an option to stop it scanning every time somewhere in the depths of the options.

I imagine Irfanview is doing something similar with photos or similar?

Kristopherus

www.free-av.com

Alun

Gneez wrote: »

I used Process Explorer here to see what was using svchost.exe as a shell and it points to my AvastSvc.exe anti-virus as a possible culprit I'm going to remove it and use another AV, anyone got a good suggestion for a free AV besides AVG (avg let me down in the past)

You could always give Microsoft Security Essentials a try, it's what I use.

Alun

Just found this on another message board ...

I've struggled with same problem for a whole day and found a workaround. There is a special file called "wmpfolders.wmdb" which stored information about all folders looked through by WMP. You can find this file in you local app folder: c:\Users\[your name]\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Media Player. What you can do with this file is mark a folder so WMP will ignore it and will not update any files stored in this folder. To do so edit this file with any text editor (it just a plain XML) and replace Exclude="0" with Exclude="-1" to mark folder as excluded.
You can exclude specific subfolders or any top level folder.

Gneez

Alun wrote: »

Well you seem to have your music on M:, and I guess Media Player is just scanning it to see if you've added any new "meeja" to the library .. I think there's an option to stop it scanning every time somewhere in the depths of the options.

I imagine Irfanview is doing something similar with photos or similar?

well N:\ has only tv series on it yet irfanview causes it to spin up
M:\ has pictures, movies, music and ISO's on it and mediaplayer causes it to spin up
Starting up Steam causes both to spin up
Starting winamp causes both to spin up too
Starting EvE causes N:\ to spin up for some reason

It really makes no sense to me why each program seems to arbitrarily spin up an unrelated drive, either way I've removed avast and deleted the library files in media players directory so I'll test further tomorrow. Thanks for the help so far.

Alun wrote: »

Just found this on another message board ...

It's not present on my PC I'm guessing because I'm still using XP and am behind the times with OS's

Alun

Gneez wrote: »

It's not present on my PC I'm guessing because I'm still using XP and am behind the times with OS's

Well, it'd be in a slightly different location due to the different places that Windows 7 and XP store their user files, but it might also be a WMP12 thing as I couldn't find it on an XP machine with WMP11 still installed.

Capt'n Midnight

Gneez wrote: »

It really makes no sense to me why each program seems to arbitrarily spin up an unrelated drive,

This is one of the problems of not having access to the source code, no one can ever know what goes on inside the program.

A lot of programs load add ons or look for files on recently used lists (you used to be able to shave a lot of time off adobe acrobat reader by unticking all the boxes - doing so now also saves you about 1MB per day in background patch downloads )

Gneez

Turns out it was avast, no more spinups except for when I open winamp and thats understandable as my music is on M:\ thanks for the help guys o/