Churning hard drive

[AndyS38]

Took delivery of new desktop pavilion today. Very aware of the hard drive constantly churning, even when there are no programmes or apps running i.e. idle! The system also keeps freezing for no apparent reason. I also have a pavilion laptop (several years old now) but this doesn't make a constant churning noise! Neither did my ancient fujitsu siemens! 

Thr fan makes a bit of noise, this is fine, but the constant churning noise is really irritating....any thoughts most welcome!

[WAWood]

AndyS38

Hello;

Allow me to welcome you to the HP forums!

You paid for free HP Tech Support as part of the warranty coverage, so you might as well make use of it.

While this PC is still under warranty, you should contact HP Customer Support directly to have them put you in touch with HP Technical Support to see what they can do about troubleshooting and repairing your machine remotely.

I did this recently and the HP Tech was able to remotely access my PC from the Internet and do the needed repairs.

If you live in the US or Canada, contact information is on this page: http://www8.hp.com/us/en/contact-hp/phone-assist.html#section1

If you live elsewhere, contact information is on this page: http://www8.hp.com/us/en/contact-hp/ww-contact-us.html

NOTE: After you get through, stay on the line until you are finally able to talk to some one -- it can take a while!

If you have trouble finding a phone number, then try: 1 (800) 474-6836

Good Luck

[mdklassen]

If your brand-new computer is, for the very first time, connected to the Internet, it could be "Windows Update" that is running, downloading and installing all the security-fixes released by Microsoft between the date that Windows was loaded in the factory and today's date.  Or, it could be the built-in anti-virus scanner running a first-time "full" scan.

Start the Windows 10 "Task Manager".

Click "More Details".

Click the "Performance" tab, and tell us the percentage of CPU usage, and the amount of "used" and "free" RAM.

For more details, click the "Resource Monitor" button at the bottom of the current window.

Expand the "Disk Activity" section, and tell us which files are being read/written.

Click on the column-headings to group by application-name, or to sort by most-bytes-per-second activity.

What do you see?

[WAWood · Accepted solution]

Poster mdklassen brings up a very good point regarding Windows Update that I had overlooked.

But also, Win10 collects LOTS and LOTS of telemetry data from everyone who uses it.  It has to store this data somewhere before sending it off to Microsoft, so it could simply be churning -- storing that data, and then reading it -- to send to MS.

Personally, I detest this intrusiveness by MS into what's going on in MY PC -- which I why I have gone to the trouble to disable all the telemetry I can (not ALL of it can be disabled).

Here's an article about NOT using Anti-Spying tools: http://www.howtogeek.com/273513/why-you-shouldnt-use-anti-spying-tools-for-windows-10/

Personally, I use SpyBot Anti-Beacon to disable most of the stuff, and have not had ANY problems with it.

The choice is yours.

[AndyS38]

Hello there, thank you for your response. I've had a look at task manager and it all seems fairly normal. Things seem to be sertling down a bit now......

it does seema bit odd that the hard drive should make any noise (maybe I'm expecting too much!) but my old laptop and other desktop pc are very quiet in comparison. Ah well!

[AndyS38]

Indeed, we are all being monitored!! Meh!

[mdklassen]

> it does seema bit odd that the hard drive should make any noise

> (maybe I'm expecting too much!) but my old laptop and other desktop pc are very quiet in comparison.

If your other computers are running Windows 7 or 8 or 10, the disk-drive is automatically "defragmented" once per week.

So, the movementsof the read/write head inside those disk-drives are "small", and thus produce a smaller level of noise, when compared to a "fresh install plus Windows Updates are being applied" collection of files "scattered" over the full range of the read/write head.  Also, a "running" computer does not do much disk I/O, as compared to a computer running Windows Update. So, fewer head-movements imply less noise.