hard drive grinding and grinding when opening certain programs at random times

[WeeHawky God's Chosen People]

I'm wondering what the deal is after noticing this too often now. The system comes to a halt and then returns to normal after the program has opened. Usually it's Skype or Spotify opening that causes it.

Should I mark it down as something to say "eh" about it worry? Perhaps a format ?

I have 20 GBs of free space left on C.

Just regular specs: Athlon II X4 640 regular clocked, WD caviar black split in 2 sections (79.9 GBs C, 516 GBs D) , 4 GBs of RAM, 1 GB HIS 6750.

I'm not really sure what the cause is. Maybe it's swapping ?

I've noticed boot taking a while longer too.

[WeeHawky God's Chosen People]

Ursprungligen skrivet av L0WHAWK:

Everytime you erase a file. it is still on the hard drive. You can recover deleted files because of this.. When you add more files to the hard drive you will eventually be placing the new files into no sequential areas of the drive.. The clusters will become so bad, that it can cause the system to slow down on loading programs, and give a grinding noise, because it is seeking all over the place to complete a file load.. If you back up a file that is fragged to a cd-r or dvd-r, etc.. It can give you a currupt file burn, even tho the burn says it is complete and error free..
But, seeing as the drive is 3+yrs old, I'd say it is time for a new one, if this is the main system drive.. Or the drive has possibly over heated and when it gets hot the platters don't function correctly..
Myself, if a drive clicks, I say it is time to replace asap..

It was getting hot.. I was getting SMART warnings in programs during gaming on the poor circulation case. (As noted earlier, it was getting up to 46 C then).

Also, I use eraser if I want something gone for John Q Public. Because everyone knows agencies can probably recover Guttman and DoD passes.

edit: Actually in the 50C's.

[L0WHAWK]

Easy Recovery Pro can still find and restore some files, even after you have repartitioned a drive.. I don't trust any drive wiping program, after using that program... Also, no matter what, every little thing you have ever done on the drive will be saved in a hiden boot sector.. a log file anyhow.. You may not be able to use any of the programs or what not, but you can get a clear history of what the drive was used for,, No matter how many formats, repartitions, etc...

[MA☝Omgwtfbbqstfu™]

Ursprungligen skrivet av weehawky:

Ursprungligen skrivet av L0WHAWK:

Everytime you erase a file. it is still on the hard drive. You can recover deleted files because of this.. When you add more files to the hard drive you will eventually be placing the new files into no sequential areas of the drive.. The clusters will become so bad, that it can cause the system to slow down on loading programs, and give a grinding noise, because it is seeking all over the place to complete a file load.. If you back up a file that is fragged to a cd-r or dvd-r, etc.. It can give you a currupt file burn, even tho the burn says it is complete and error free..
But, seeing as the drive is 3+yrs old, I'd say it is time for a new one, if this is the main system drive.. Or the drive has possibly over heated and when it gets hot the platters don't function correctly..
Myself, if a drive clicks, I say it is time to replace asap..

It was getting hot.. I was getting SMART warnings in programs during gaming on the poor circulation case. (As noted earlier, it was getting up to 46 C then).

Also, I use eraser if I want something gone for John Q Public. Because everyone knows agencies can probably recover Guttman and DoD passes.

edit: Actually in the 50C's.

The whole "recovering" overwritten data thing is probably a myth if you google it, it was based on very old harddrive tech where the tracks were very far apart by todays standards, now, it would take extraordinary measures to even begin to try such a thing, if possible at all.

So, at this point its IT guys excuse to play counterstrike while pretending to do work.

[WeeHawky God's Chosen People]

Ursprungligen skrivet av MA☝Omgwtfbbqstfu™:

Ursprungligen skrivet av weehawky:

It was getting hot.. I was getting SMART warnings in programs during gaming on the poor circulation case. (As noted earlier, it was getting up to 46 C then).

Also, I use eraser if I want something gone for John Q Public. Because everyone knows agencies can probably recover Guttman and DoD passes.

edit: Actually in the 50C's.

The whole "recovering" overwritten data thing is probably a myth if you google it, it was based on very old harddrive tech where the tracks were very far apart by todays standards, now, it would take extraordinary measures to even begin to try such a thing, if possible at all.

So, at this point its IT guys excuse to play counterstrike while pretending to do work.

Who plays counter strike at a job? o.O

[yberkurko]

I have noticed lags on computers when C is getting full.... 20 GB left is quite full. It could be drive starting to fail too with system than old.

[WeeHawky God's Chosen People]

Ursprungligen skrivet av yberkurko:

I have noticed lags on computers when C is getting full.... 20 GB left is quite full. It could be drive starting to fail too with system than old.

Perhaps I need to back up and repartition then. 20 is usually pretty empty to me.

[MA☝Omgwtfbbqstfu™]

20 is not empty, not familiar with black sizing, but 20gb out of 600~GB is extremely small, and will result in fragmentation unless the remaining area is really heavily defragmented into a solid block. The more empty a drive the better.

Anyways try ultradefrag's boot time defrag.

And you might want to see what processes and other crud you've loaded up over time. My guess is that on a system of that age you also have accumulated junk.

[rotNdude]

A grinding hard drive noise is not good. Make plans to replace it if you have never heard those grinding noises before. Sometimes you will hear unusual noises when the drive is accessing areas on the drive that have never been accessed before, but you should always be wary of that.

[MA☝Omgwtfbbqstfu™]

Might mean its trying over and over to reread bad sectors. But again, stuff only gets fixed on writes, so he has to do something like clone the drive, run spinrite or do some other way of forcing the issue.

[WeeHawky God's Chosen People]

Ursprungligen skrivet av rotNdude:

A grinding hard drive noise is not good. Make plans to replace it if you have never heard those grinding noises before. Sometimes you will hear unusual noises when the drive is accessing areas on the drive that have never been accessed before, but you should always be wary of that.

It's just the reglar old sound amplified. (Heavy usage) . It's always made the sound.

Ursprungligen skrivet av MA☝Omgwtfbbqstfu™:

20 is not empty, not familiar with black sizing, but 20gb out of 600~GB is extremely small, and will result in fragmentation unless the remaining area is really heavily defragmented into a solid block. The more empty a drive the better.

Anyways try ultradefrag's boot time defrag.

And you might want to see what processes and other crud you've loaded up over time. My guess is that on a system of that age you also have accumulated junk.

Programs and everything take up about 55 GBs before even downloads on C:

I just got rid of my download folder by backing it up on a networked computer and it's only 25 GBs free.

[MA☝Omgwtfbbqstfu™]

Well the first mistake is that c: partition is too small
It can be manageble but generally 250 is a better number because as I said its good to have free space on a drive or partition. Its too late but you should still be able to get it down a bit further with ccleaner and perhaps just moving or uninstalling some rarely used apps, mklink lets you move directories to wherever other partition or drive and still have the program work.
On really rarely used games or applications, try using ntfs compression on those.
You should have a cheap media storage drive to offload the raptor,I'm sure plenty of stuff just doesn't need to be on that drive.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ntfscompressor/
super old but it can work on selectively compressing some things, basically it only compresses a file if over a certain threshold. Of course don't use it on system directories.
Can you install another drive? You know even in a small case you can just cram another drive in, doesn't even have to be strapped down, you can velcro it or whatever you want, I have several drives just sitting at the bottom of my case right now because I ran out of drive bays. Space is incredibly cheap now, so go get some;) Plus with a new drive you can clone the thing back and forth to get rid of potential problems.

[WeeHawky God's Chosen People]

Ursprungligen skrivet av MA☝Omgwtfbbqstfu™:

Well the first mistake is that c: partition is too small
It can be manageble but generally 250 is a better number because as I said its good to have free space on a drive or partition. Its too late but you should still be able to get it down a bit further with ccleaner and perhaps just moving or uninstalling some rarely used apps, mklink lets you move directories to wherever other partition or drive and still have the program work.
On really rarely used games or applications, try using ntfs compression on those.
You should have a cheap media storage drive to offload the raptor,I'm sure plenty of stuff just doesn't need to be on that drive.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ntfscompressor/
super old but it can work on selectively compressing some things, basically it only compresses a file if over a certain threshold. Of course don't use it on system directories.
Can you install another drive? You know even in a small case you can just cram another drive in, doesn't even have to be strapped down, you can velcro it or whatever you want, I have several drives just sitting at the bottom of my case right now because I ran out of drive bays. Space is incredibly cheap now, so go get some;) Plus with a new drive you can clone the thing back and forth to get rid of potential problems.

Yeah I could put in another drive easily, if I had the money.. but I don't.

Maybe I should back everything up and then partition it about 120 GBs instead of 80 for C: ?

[MA☝Omgwtfbbqstfu™]

Thats a lot of work for probably no gain, unless of course it writes on the bad sectors and thus fixes the problem, its a lot to backup your whole drive...or are you saying you have a spare drive to clone to?

Run drive cleaners like ccleaner and other stuff and just ntfs compress anything that isn't something you run regularly. There has to be a way of lowering the base disc usage. I think windows disk space cleaner has the option of cleaning out left over service pack stuff as well.

[WeeHawky God's Chosen People]

Ursprungligen skrivet av MA☝Omgwtfbbqstfu™:

Thats a lot of work for probably no gain, unless of course it writes on the bad sectors and thus fixes the problem, its a lot to backup your whole drive...or are you saying you have a spare drive to clone to?

Run drive cleaners like ccleaner and other stuff and just ntfs compress anything that isn't something you run regularly. There has to be a way of lowering the base disc usage. I think windows disk space cleaner has the option of cleaning out left over service pack stuff as well.

When I get to uninstalling programs I want to keep and use , and so forth just to try to get some more space.. what's the point ? The computer isn't what I want it to be then.

I could probably put more stuff on D: partition , it's got 189 of 516 left.

[MA☝Omgwtfbbqstfu™]

Ursprungligen skrivet av weehawky:

Ursprungligen skrivet av MA☝Omgwtfbbqstfu™:

Thats a lot of work for probably no gain, unless of course it writes on the bad sectors and thus fixes the problem, its a lot to backup your whole drive...or are you saying you have a spare drive to clone to?

Run drive cleaners like ccleaner and other stuff and just ntfs compress anything that isn't something you run regularly. There has to be a way of lowering the base disc usage. I think windows disk space cleaner has the option of cleaning out left over service pack stuff as well.

When I get to uninstalling programs I want to keep and use , and so forth just to try to get some more space.. what's the point ? The computer isn't what I want it to be then.

Ntfs compression on some apps can save some space. Other things like piles of documents as well. Small things, but you are kind of in a bind so every bit helps.

Also exclude some proceses from the av scanner, check performance monitor in task manager to see what's actually being read and written during thrashing, and by what