Logging disk use - possible?

[CarvedDuck]

Win8.0 - Acer i5 laptop, wifi to Modem/Router and Internet.

Hi, just went to make some coffee and when I came back (about 10-mins) the hard drive light was flashing like crazy. I moved the mouse and it kept going but as soon as I clicked, it stopped instantly. I then didn't touch the mouse or keyboard and after 5-minutes it started flashing again. Then stopped again with the click.

Now, not wanting to sound too paranoid, is there a way I can log what applications are using the HDD? Plus if they are reading or writing to it?

Thanks

 

[Saltgrass]

It is probably just some maintenance work being done. Possibly NTFS doing drive maintenance.

If you want to check, leave the Resource Monitor open and on the Disk Tab to see what process is doing the most Read/writes. Once you know that, put a check mark next to that process and watch the windows below it to see what is happening in that process. You should able to pick out something.

 

[Ivo]

It can be a lot of things. It can be AV software doing its scheduled scan, or disk defragmentation, or pre-compiling of .Net assemblies (particularly soon after installing a Windows Update).

Software like Process Explorer can show which process is doing the disk access. You need to add a new column "I/O Delta Total Bytes" because it is not there by default. There are also columns like "I/O Delta Read Bytes" and "I/O Delta Write Bytes" if you are interested if the access is read or write.