Over many years, this has without doubt been one of the commonest questions we’ve encountered at Server Sentry.
It usually arises because a customer is concerned that one of their PCs or perhaps a server appears to be constantly accessing its disk and making whirring noises - even when they aren’t actually doing anything on the system at the time.
As almost always with IT systems support, there is no one sure answer to the question. It could have any number of causes including:
• Even though you are n’t doing anything on your system at the time, it could be automatic software that is running various routines which are making heavy use of disk access (technically called ‘disk I/O’ for Input/Output). That might include things such as software security scans, updates following the automatic download of new versions of software and so on.
• It could indicate that your disk is seriously fragmented. That does n’t mean damaged, it simply means that individual databases and files have been split into different sections and placed on different parts of the disk. That is perfectly normal and is the way disk space utilisation is optimised but when the splitting of logical units of data becomes very pronounced, the disk is needing to do a lot more work in order to access what you may think of as a single integrated file of data. It is possible to run what are called disk de- fragmentation programs to help the problem.
• In some, hopefully rare, circumstances, it might indicate that you have a certain type of malware on your system.
• It’s possible that it is a symptom of potential disk controller problems.
There’s no need to get overly worried about what’s happening.
Simply call us and we will diagnose exactly what’s going on and if appropriate, assist you to take remedial action.
It usually arises because a customer is concerned that one of their PCs or perhaps a server appears to be constantly accessing its disk and making whirring noises - even when they aren’t actually doing anything on the system at the time.
As almost always with IT systems support, there is no one sure answer to the question. It could have any number of causes including:
• Even though you are n’t doing anything on your system at the time, it could be automatic software that is running various routines which are making heavy use of disk access (technically called ‘disk I/O’ for Input/Output). That might include things such as software security scans, updates following the automatic download of new versions of software and so on.
• It could indicate that your disk is seriously fragmented. That does n’t mean damaged, it simply means that individual databases and files have been split into different sections and placed on different parts of the disk. That is perfectly normal and is the way disk space utilisation is optimised but when the splitting of logical units of data becomes very pronounced, the disk is needing to do a lot more work in order to access what you may think of as a single integrated file of data. It is possible to run what are called disk de- fragmentation programs to help the problem.
• In some, hopefully rare, circumstances, it might indicate that you have a certain type of malware on your system.
• It’s possible that it is a symptom of potential disk controller problems.
There’s no need to get overly worried about what’s happening.
Simply call us and we will diagnose exactly what’s going on and if appropriate, assist you to take remedial action.
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