harddrive spin up everytime I start firefox or load a site

Seneca · Post by **Seneca** » Sun Apr 12, 2009 9:06 am

This is seriously annoying.

I've got a 2,5" laptop drive as the system drive and a 3,5" drive for all my data. The data drive is hardly ever accessed except when I play music or transfer files.

So I enabled harddrive spin down to reduce the heat and sound/vibrations from the extra drive. But when I'm just doing some browsing, it just suddenly spins up, freezing my entire system until it has completely initialized.

This has never been a problem when I've used Linux.

I'm running vista 64bit, so I've disabled indexing and filesharing on this drive. And I've used filemon to try and find out what process is accessing data on my drive, but I've found nothing but query's relating to volume information.

Do anyone have any ideas on what to do?

Cheers!

notquitequiet · Post by **notquitequiet** » Sun Apr 12, 2009 10:33 am

Maybe it's your paging file? You can set which drives you want to use for that in the system control panel. My Vista computer is off right now, but I think it's the same with XP and Vista. Also make sure the cache for the browser and all of it's files are on the 2.5" drive. Clear your MRU file lists? That's about the limits of my knowledge.

nutball · Post by **nutball** » Sun Apr 12, 2009 11:24 am

Another possible culprit is system restore.

fri2219 · Post by **fri2219** » Sun Apr 12, 2009 12:00 pm

It's probably accessing the (hidden) %HOME%\Application Data Directory for Mozilla- even if you have a cache allocated to zero, it still stores a fair amount of data via SQLite, not to mention the caches from the JavaVM and SpiderMonkey (Mozilla JavaScript engine).

I don't know enough about the differences between the Windows and Linux versions of Firefox, but I'd be willing to believe that a lot of that activity gets stored in /tmp and is memory-cached in Linux.

Seneca · Post by **Seneca** » Mon Apr 13, 2009 2:04 am

I've disabled system restore, there's no pagefile on the extra disk and I've cleared all the mru file lists. But the problem still persists. I mean, why would firefox want to access d:? There is no temporary storage there, and permanent storage for any programs. I've also checked with filemon if there's any process accessing d:. But nothing is accessing it.

You guys have to have some sort of similar setup? A quiet 2,5" hdd for system and a larger 3,5" for data storage?

Can any of you replicate my problem?

alecmg · Post by **alecmg** » Mon Apr 13, 2009 3:28 am

Your problem is... Windows.

There.

But really, you wouldn't notice it unless it didn't freeze your system for a while every time. THAT is really annoying. Stone age programming does that.

And my guess for reason of spin up - just polling the hardware before writing to see if its still attached. Or writing a journal. And stone age programming causes this action to be done on all hard drives at once.

Seneca · Post by **Seneca** » Mon Apr 13, 2009 10:03 am

*sigh*

Well, I was already considering having ubuntu as my primary os for while now. Guess this settles it.

Thank you for your input guys