Hard drive goes nuts during a steam updates/downloads - Hardware & Software

This has started to appear as of late, that when steam tries to download anything (note : this only happens with steam), the hard drive goes a bit... "overtime" Now this is my 500GB SATA HD in a normal state : [IMG]http://i.imgur.com/D9olGIs.png[/IMG] And this is it [del]on crack[/del] during a steam update [IMG]http://i.imgur.com/ksKqYmz.png[/IMG] The result being that the only thing not frozen during this is my mouse. And even that tends to hang, I cannot try to run anything during it because the HD is so overloaded, and I had to turn the power settings for idle disks to "never turn off" because it was causing my shit to bluescreen. Any help on this would be greatly useful. The updates do finish after a while but this is just absurd.

How much RAM do you have installed in your system? It's fishy that System writes more to the drive than Steam does, which makes me think of a high hard fault per second rate caused by lack of RAM. Take a look at the Hard Faults/sec graph in the Memory tab while Steam is downloading / updating

[QUOTE=Merijnwitje;43823999]How much RAM do you have installed in your system? It's fishy that System writes more to the drive than Steam does, which makes me think of a high hard fault per second rate caused by lack of RAM. Take a look at the Hard Faults/sec graph in the Memory tab while Steam is downloading / updating[/QUOTE] 8 GB of dual channel DDR3 RAM 660MHz. I'm going to look at it now.

Add the steam directory to your antivirus' whitelist so it won't try to scan everything that's being saved or read, MSE for example is pretty bad when it comes to HDD use.

[img]http://i.imgur.com/4Cb64nV.png[/img] Updated chivalry and it went fine. It appears this problem only occurs during dota 2 updates, so it may be related to that. Unless that tiny spike there is bad news [editline]7th February 2014[/editline] [img]http://i.imgur.com/nTbBNY5.png[/img] although when I deleted the content the meter spiked to the top.

Nah, that's not enough to make your hard drive freak out completely. I had a Acer laptop on my hands once which had only 1 GB of RAM, even if you would leave the thing alone for a long time the hard drive just goes crazy.

If the HDD is thrashing like mad, it could actually be a sign of HDD failure.

Sorry for the bump, but a solution was found a while ago and I figured I should put it here. Step 1 : check your motherboard Sata connections Step 2 : check which type of Sata connection your hard drive is built for Step 3 : unplug the Sata 2 connector and put it in the Sata 3 connector. Step 4 : hit self with brick repeatedly until all the stupid is gone. Basically, this was the hard drive trying to use it's full speed on a slot that couldn't handle it. No small wonder it was crashing so much while read/writing.