Hard Drive Constant Seeking

[Maestro1]

Does anyone know why the hard drive is constantly seeking on Win 10?
The hard drive lite is constantly blinking even when the computer is idle.

 

[Alpha One Seven]

It is reading or writing to the drive.
What is it's current fragmentation percentage?

 

[Maestro1]

Yes. i think it is reading and writing.
0 % frag

 

[~mr mixx~]

This is normal....it does it on my computer too.

 

[AMD_man]

Is this an external drive? What do you have on the drive?

 

[strollin]

It could be that the drive is being indexed or something along that line. It's not normal, as none of the six computers I own running Win 10 do it. However, all of my computers have SSD boot drives which might be a factor.

 

[AMD_man]

Nay it's normal. If it's the main drive with the OS, Windows will be constantly writing and reading on it. Very smalls amount of data, but still using it.

 

[crazyman143]

You can use resource monitor to see what processes are using the disk and can sort by top read/write.

Search for resource monitor from the start menu, or access it from the "Performance" tab in your Task Manager.

I think it's normal to see some subtle disk activity while the PC is idle. If it's excessive, you might want to check there.

 

[iPwn]

I'm going to dissent from the group here a bit;

If this is a new setup, it may be the Search Indexing processing reading and cataloging all the data on the drive. That said, it should eventually stop doing that. Idle, Windows should only need to access information in RAM, with the occasional read/write to the pagefile.

As crazyman noted, it would also be worthy to check the resource monitor to see what program is using disk resources.

Anytime I've had that happen, it's been either a failing drive or bloatware (perhaps even malware). It may be worth getting a rootkit checker, but again, do a bit of digging into what's using those resources.