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Heavy HDD activity when gaming

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extr3me

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Hi,

Recently I noticed that I get huge but short (for about one minute lasting) HHD activity when playing games. It happens randomly once or twice an hour. During that time game is unplayable, usually freezes. HDD led is lit constantly during that time which imposes that it is doing something heavy. Sometimes I manage to minimize the game and check task manager but it shows nothing. Event viewer shows no errors as well. I don't have temperature issues and it's definitely not the case. Any ideas?
 
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Your hard drive is going south. Test it
 
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extr3me

Guest
Any programs u might suggest? But i get those activities mostly during multiplayer games like UT3 or LFD2 where levels are preloaded before game play so it should not be the case of failing HDD because there is no loading during game play. I might say some windows process is taking place at that time but can not find which one exactly. Well that's my opinion.
 
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I suggest HDTune.

Once installed and launched, click on the health tab to see if there are any warnings.
After that even though the health status maybe clear run an error scan.
This will take a while but it will tell you if there are any bad sectors on your HDD causing the problem.

Other than that, replace all SATA cables in your system.

Although in my experience a faulty SATA cable or loose connection, usually causes the HDD light to stay on permanently with system freezes every few seconds.
 
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extr3me

Guest
OK, I played around with my software a bit an found out that it was my antivirus causing such problems, reinstalled it and now it works fine.
 

ctrain

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In the future you can just open the windows resource monitor and see what's bombing the HD. It has a list of all processes and what they're doing CPU, HD, and Network wise
 
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extr3me

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Does XP have such option? Never heard of it before. Thanks anyway.
 
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Does XP have such option? Never heard of it before. Thanks anyway.

One way with XP is if you have two monitors, you could have task manager open on the process tab, click on CPU to make sure the process using the most resources moves to the top and click on show all process from all users.

With a single monitor, while the HDD is active and everything locks up, you won't be able to see which process is taking up the resources.

Anyway good to hear you resolved the issue.

Certain anti-virus can causes high system usage if they become corrupt.

Most of the time, I find if McAfee gets corrupted by MalWare of some sort it can cause such problems.
 
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extr3me

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I use Kaspersky Internet Security and it is one of the best in the market as I know. I wonder how does it get corrupt. I had such problems before with this software.
 
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I use Kaspersky Internet Security and it is one of the best in the market as I know. I wonder how does it get corrupt. I had such problems before with this software.

Unfortunately I have no experience with Kaspersky and the usual reasons why it would get corrupted.

Kaspersky over here is one of the less used Antivirus programs but still appears to have great reviews over the internet.

Most people here, tend to use NOD32, McAfee or Norton when it comes to subscription anti-virus.

All three are due to retailers pushing the software and all three can have some unusual problems.

I have had NOD32 cause long hangs at the end of downloading a file as it scans it.
Already mentioned the main issue with McAfee
Norton can also become corrupt like McAfee and the Norton system backup can cause havoc with DVD drives, even causing the icon to be removed, but in saying that I have been told Norton anti-virus has become much better lately.

I personally use AVG Free.

I rarely encounter the viruses/malware customers acquire due to using file sharing programs which are known to contain bogus files (which they should not be downloading) which cause grief once double clicked on.
 
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