HDD reading/writing like mad?

[Scotty]

It's been doing this for a while now, and it's slowly getting really annoying.

I have 3 Hard drives in my PC, here is what they are and what they do.

80GB- Windows Install, a few programs and files, Photoshop scratch disk.
160GB- Main program drive, main file drive, also has Page file of 4-5GB
74GB Raptor- Main Games drive, some files, Photoshop scratch disk, 1GB page file.

So here's what happens, usually when i'm just browsign the web, maybe with iTunes and MSN open at the same time, one of my hard drives starts making a reading/writing noise (idk what to call it, sort of clicking..., but not clicking, you should know anyway) And my HDD LED starts going crazy, so it's defiantly doing something.

Yet my Vista sidebar, shows me live HDD usage, sees NO change at all over the current usage.

I have made sure when it happens, that my Anti-virus/spyware etc are not running tests.
Nothing on the PC slows down in the way of opening/loading things...

So for some strange reason every now and again i get some crazy ass stuff going on, then it'll just stop...

Any ideas?

[Crazy Buddhist]

Could be a sign of a disk failure, a piece of malware at work, a bug, ???, Vista doing a resore or some othet weird ass crap MicroSoft thought we all needed by default - almost anything.

Try using an external piece of disk monitoring software and see if that picks anything up? Also some disk health check or another (I can't be assed to google it for you sorry lol).

De-install if you have them Adaware and Spybot then do clean installs with new downloads.

If it still goes on after that I'd try turning the hifi up.

;)

pss or the NSA catching up on your plans.

[Cannibal23]

vista is set to do predictive precache of stuff it thinks you will use soon. it could be trying to do that. if you want to know what is acctually accessing it during those times i suggest a free tool from the microsoft site named filemon. it will watch disk access and report what program was accessing at a particular time. the file it was accessing, roughly what it was trying to do and if it was successfull or not. there is also a tool for your registry that does the same thing.

Filemon (http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/utilities/filemon.mspx)
Regmon (http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/utilities/regmon.mspx)

[Scotty]

Well i grabbed some S.M.A.R.T monitoring tools, everything looks as good as it can be near enough.

I'll do a fresh install of Spybot as i've got that.

Looks like i'll be turning up my volume then :)

edit:

Cheers for the links Cannibal, looks like they have been updated for vista but i found them. +rep

[Luke122]

Have you tried defragging?

[Scotty]

No, i haven't had time to defrag. When i get some free time when i dont need to use the PC i will do.

[D1337]

why dont you just defrag while your sleeping or at school/work?

[xRyokenx]

I defrag the partitions on my hard drive every few days now. It takes less than 5mins each (from 35-80GB per partition).

[crenn]

Use a good program to defrag. I use PerfectDisk 8 myself and I recommend it for it's offline defrag feature!