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My hard drive keeps on working full-time even when I've been doing nothing for a long time! At first I thought it was some malware, and it could be, because it made my hard drive collapse. So the question is, what could make the hard drive work without stopping so long?

Pablito
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  • When you are doing nothing Windows does "housekeeping" tasks, like indexing, virus scans, .... – DavidPostill Oct 25 '15 at 12:45
  • It could also be your hard drive is failing. Check your drive smart status. [How can I read my hard drive's SMART status in Windows 7?](http://superuser.com/q/29240) – DavidPostill Oct 25 '15 at 12:46
  • @DavidPostill, believe me, this isn't normal... I've been using this computer for an year, and this is the first time it happens... And already being like that for a week – Pablito Oct 25 '15 at 12:47
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    That is one sign of a failing drive ... I suggest you backup **now** (to another drive) just in case the drive completely fails. – DavidPostill Oct 25 '15 at 12:49

1 Answers1

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There's tools that tell you this

Go to task manager, go to 'performance', click on the open resource manager link at the bottom, and pick the 'disk' tab

enter image description here

There you can sort through which processes are doing disk activity, and which files are being written to.

if disk load is high, but read/write speeds are low, that might be an indication that there's a lot of read failures, and your drive is slowly failing.

If you do think its failing, I'd suggest checking SMART status -I'm a fan of gsmartctrl (and I have a walkthrough on how to use it in another answer) but there's other tools that work. However that and doing a last ditch backup of a failing drive are outside the scope of the question.

Community
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Journeyman Geek
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