Railfan Technology > Who's beating u my hard drive(s) - Firefox? Kaspersky? Windows?

I believe I've inquired about this before but did not get an answer that
I thought solved the issue with certainty, nor offered verification.

I've about - beyond had it.

While I'm on my computer - seemingly at any hour of the day, though I
notice it most, late at night and into the wee hours of the morning -
my hard drive(s) are being accessed in sporadic - often long bursts
seemingly at random. It almost sounds like I'm de-fragmenting drives.

I have Windows 8 on my boot drive - which is an SSD drive, along with
Photoshop, Lightroom, Mozilla Firefox, just about everything shy of
photos which are on separate drives - both internal and external. I
also have another SSD drive set up for virtual memory.

SOMETHING, or someone is roaming through my drives - I'd not hear
the SSD drives (for better or worse), but I certainly hear the drives
with images, sound files and movie clips on them. WHY?

Granted - I am using an anti-virus; Kaspersky which has served me well
and I doubt the Russians will gain anything should they mirror a copy
of my drives.

Granted, I am using or tend to always have Adobe CC Lightroom and PS
open, as well as dozens of Mozilla Firefox tabs at any give moment.

I just do not get why the drives are so intensely scoured for several
minutes at a time (gotta be a lot of wear and tear - if not theft).

I understand perhaps the open tabs are being updated? Saved? The
anti-virus is running in the background. But why are my drives with
images being scanned? Why so intense - it's like the sound of dropping
bee bee pellets dropping on a plate.

And if legit - how can I monitor which programs are creating the issue?

Task Monitor typically shows the heavy users (abusers) as multiple Firefox
processes, each using 11 to 33 percent "CPU" / 950 MB memory use - cumulative
3 to 55% memory for several bursts at a time, even when doing nothing, followed
by Adobe (CC, PS, and LR) - again, even when not in use, though more often than
not - open in the background).

Thanks

/Mitch

If you choose, or defaulted into, continuous backup or continuous virus scans that may explain the hard drive activity. The backup may be from PhotoShop or a similar application as well.

Firefox has a bunch of duplicate processes, they can be understood by taking the process name to google, a number of techie type blogs should be listed in the search including blogs from firefox and Microsoft that will explain what they do and how to minimize their CPU time. Most S/W generates it's own error log that it sends home every so often.

Kapersky's database is located near Moscow, the Russian Government is allowed access to the database and all the info that is used by Kapersky to load it's Virus Scan onto your machine. They already have your MAC address, your IP address and your credit card info.

A quick way to determine if 'someone' is actively accessing your system is to simply unplug the net cable and see if there are any changes to the drive activity. If it's an internal (ie continuous backup) setting it will not change the routine. Hard to tell if it's someone from outside but there would be some sort of different activity. This also assumes you have a decent firewall in the Router and maybe the modem or ISP.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/03/18 09:39 by TCnR.

One of my friends had a similar problem with his Windows 10 computer a couple in mid January. It was beyond slow to boot up and the hard drive stop running 100%, and it was running seemingly non-stop most of the time, even while having nothing running other than the usual services, etc.

Figuring either he had some 'bot' running on his computer, perhaps sending 1000s of junk emails/minute or some kind of virus, I took it home to see what I could come up with. Even after stopping Norton internet security, the HD kept running 'full steam ahead'. So I tried downloading a variety of anti virus programs starting with Malwarebytes which, in the past, has found some things missed by other software. It came up empty after a 2+ hr scan. I tried a couple more I found after Google'ing the problem and they came up empty handed as well. But one of the threads I found suggested Malwarebytes 'root kit' scan. That was a separate downloadable free program and after 2 hours or so on the dual CPU 2.1 ghz processor it came up with about a half dozen viruses and cleaned them off. It's a good thing I fix friends' computers for free as with all the endless waits for scans to complete, I spent 10-12 hours screwing with it.

The result was the computer was running very noticeably faster for everything. But, there were still intermittent times when the hard drive would fire off 'full speed ahead' and slow things down for 4-5 minutes, then everything was OK for 30 minutes or so, and off it went again. A couple days later, after calling me again, I told him what to look for in a new computer and to wait to find one on sale at Walmart, Amazon, etc. He found one that afternoon for $300ish at Best Buy and after sending me the link to review it, I told him to buy it. The next day I transferred all his programs and data and installed a freshly downloaded copy of Norton compliments of Kommie-Kast Kable** Company. He and his wife are happy as clams these days. I haven't heard a 'peep' out of them about computer problems since!

** It's a long story about their terrible customer service why I call them the KKK. I couldn't come up with a better acronym.

I have a SSD in my Windows 7 laptop Lenovo computer that I run ATCS on.
I was using Kaspersky and about every 10 days I would run out of memory. I have 8 G.

Reboot start all over again and the same thing.

I finally figured out it was Kaspersky that was eating all of my memory.

I switched to the free Microsoft virus protection, Microsoft Security Essential and it has been fine for about 3 weeks now.

I used to really like Kaspersky but lately, I have come to hate it.

Also slows down my wife's Windows 7 laptop also.

I disabled the virus protection, runs a lot better.

Pat
South Austin, TX

Do one of the following:

• Open Task Manager, go the Performance tab, click on Resource Monitor
• Click on Start, type into the box "resource"

Once Resource Monitor is open, click on the Disk tab.

You can now view exactly what processes are causing disk activity in the top window and if you click on one of those in the middle window you will see what actual files it is touching.

NOW, you will see a lot of things that will not make any sense to you, as there are a lot of system processes. But this may help you figure out what is going on.
 

---

I've had a similar problem with my laptop, which is about five years old, with 4 gb hdd that spins at 5400 rpm. I don't use this very often, so I didn't do anything about it until I saw the original post.

I have managed to take care of the constant hdd accessing on my machine, but it may not be applicable to the original poster's issues, since his sporadic disk drive access is not on his primary or C: drive. (I have an ssd as my primary drive on my desktop, and use the hdd as a secondary drive. I do hear it accessing from time to time, but it's minimal.) Is it possible that there are some program installed on the auxiliary drives that are still being used?

Anti-malware programs will use the hard drive a lot during the first few minutes after booting up, as will some other services/programs, like OneDrive, Dropbox, etc.

At the recommendation of a suggestion I found online, I stopped several services: Super Fetch, Windows Search, and Background Intelligent Service. That seems to have solved the problem, although I don't know what effect the loss of these services will have in the future. One might want to look at other background services to see if one or the other could be safely stopped.

I also increased the size of the paging file, although I am not sure that did much, and have gone back to a system managed size for that file.

Of course, I did all these things knowing that this machine is not critical to my computing needs. If anything goes wrong, it's not a disaster.

My thanks for the original post and other commnents. You prompted me to do something about this annoying problem, and so far, things are running well.

colehour Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I also increased the size of the paging file,
> although I am not sure that did much, and have
> gone back to a system managed size for that file.

A performance recommended item is to set manually set the paging file size to a minimum and maximum size of 3.5 times the installed memory, and if possible on a different drive (or partition) as that of the OS partition.

However, with newer 64 bit operating systems with 4 GB of physical memory or more, that recommendation is now 2 times the installed memory.

If you have a newer 64 bit operating system with at least 8 GB of physical memory, the recommendation depends largely upon what will be running, but minimum is 1 GB larger than physical memory.

Disconnect from the internet and see if it still happens, that would eliminate one variable should it persist.

Bill Miller
Galt, ON

jst3751 Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Do one of the following:
>
> [*]Open Task Manager, go the Performance tab,
> click on Resource Monitor
> [*]Click on Start, type into the box "resource"
>
> Once Resource Monitor is open, click on the Disk
> tab.
>
> You can now view exactly what processes are
> causing disk activity in the top window and if you
> click on one of those in the middle window you
> will see what actual files it is touching.
>
> NOW, you will see a lot of things that will not
> make any sense to you, as there are a lot of
> system processes. But this may help you figure out
> what is going on.
>  

Excellent advice. You won't have to guess, you will see what is activating the I/O.

Thanks for all the replies and advice - it'll take a while to
digest it all, and later begin the trial and errors.

As for bringing up the Task Monitor - I've done that, but these
days, the list of processes seems near endless, and a good number
seem to be Windows related, and mandatory. Disconnecting from
the Internet seems to work well - but I assume what ever was run-
ing, is simply waiting to run again once back on line.

/Mitch

FWIW, I run WIN7 on 4 core-7 computers. My internal hard drives seem to be okay (1 TB, 7500 rpm), but I occasionally notice the processers working harder than they should be in respect to the task at hand.

I found that running CCleaner followed by a re-boot seems to solve most of the issues described above.

I also run Malwarebytes and Spybot every two or three weeks.

As for anti-virus programs, I'm definitely not a fan of Kaspersky or Norton. Avast has worked well for me. I have also had some issues with the "new and improved" Adaware program. They should have just kept it simple.

I also found that running a disc defrag program once or twice a month also helps smooth things out. My favorite is Defrag-a-File which defrags the files AND the drive's "free space."

After having jumped ship from 3 'pig' internet security packages through the years, I settled on Kaspersky 3 or 4 years ago and it not only made my computers run faster, but was seemingly less problematic than the others were, too. That is...until a couple weeks ago.

Out of the blue, Kaspersky blocked access to www.Amtrak.com. It took a number of tests to verify that. After opening a trouble report, their response was to add Amtrak.com to the 'trusted' site list. That worked for 2 days. Long story short, as of yesterday, they are gone! Never mind I threw away 6 months of unused licensing.

On the SSD equipped, overclocked, 8-processor computer I built, reading this thread a couple days ago caused me to look at my hard drive activity. Sure enough, it was getting 'hit' more than I thought. I exitted Kaspersky and it quieted down noticeably. That was the initial hint that Kaspersky was running my SSD more than reasonable. I just hadn't noticed it because my computer and the SSD is so fast.

After deleting Kaspersky and installing Bitdefender, I can now report there is very little SSD activity...maybe one 'quickie' every 7-8 seconds (probably Win 7 activities) vs slightly less than a second apart with Kaspersky. My problem, and the OPs' problem both solved.