Odd noise from hard drive when idle

[kestrel]

Hi,

I have a Toshiba notebook and I've noticed something strange lately. If I haven't used the PC for several minutes and the monitor has shut off, the hard drive starts making a lot of noise. The noise isn't unusual itself, it just sounds as if the hard drive is really working, as if I'm loading a bunch of programs or something. As soon as I touch the mouse, the noise stops immediately. At first I thought it was making noise to activate the screen saver, but I disabled the screen saver and the noise hasn't stopped. It just doesn't make sense to me, and I keep wondering what my hard drive is doing to make all that noise (it continues for quite awhile too). Any advice would be greatly appreciated! Thank you

 

[Nodsu]

It is either Windows doing housekeeping or some defrag/antivirus program doing its stuff. Nothing to worry about.

 

[kestrel]

Hi,

Thank you for the response...I have another question, though...I usually have a few torrents ul/dl when I leave the computer idle. If defrag runs then, wouldn't that be bad? Since more fragments are constantly be downloaded defrag wouldn't be able to complete, and wouldn't that overwork the hard drive? Plus...I think you have to have 15 % hard drive free to fully defrag and I have 5% or so free.. Is it possible to disable auto defrag so it only runs when you choose?

 

[Nodsu]

If you haven't installed some more advanced automatic defragmentation program and enabled auto defrag by yourself then you don't have automatic defragmentation running.

It is not a good idea to use your system/programs partition for downloads. It is better to download to a dedicated downloads/data partition so the high fragmentation levels wouldn't slow down your system.