Have you ever noticed that when you’re not using your computer or even not “intensively” using it, it seems like your hard drive is really busy as though it is searching for something? The hard disk drive LED will start flashing and sometimes you can even hear that the hard drive is grinding. Funny thing is this can still happen even if you have closed all running programs. If you’re using laptop, it’s even worse because the fan will start spinning like mad when the hard drive is working hard and this will shorten the battery life!

Most of the time the culprit that causes your hard drive to work are anti-virus software, anti-spyware software, instant messenger programs (IM), and Microsoft’s own indexing service. It’s OK if a legitimate program is making your hard drive to work but you’ll never know if a hacker is doing a search on your hard drive looking for confidential stuff! Unfortunately, Microsoft didn’t include a tool to diagnose and check what program is secretly accessing your hard drive. The built-in Windows Task Manager doesn’t show you anything at all other than CPU and Memory Usage. So I am going to show you how to find out what process is busy reading and writing your hard drive when you’re not causing it.

I will show you two tools that can check what is accessing your hard drive.

1. FileMon

- FileMon monitors and displays file system activity on a system in real-time. Its advanced capabilities make it a powerful tool for exploring the way Windows works, seeing how applications use the files and DLLs, or tracking down problems in system or application file configurations. Filemon’s timestamping feature will show you precisely when every open, read, write or delete, happens, and its status column tells you the outcome. FileMon is so easy to use that you’ll be an expert within minutes. It begins monitoring when you start it, and its output window can be saved to a file for off-line viewing. It has full search capability, and if you find that you’re getting information overload, simply set up one or more filters.

There is a similar tool called DiskMon, which is also developed by the same author as FileMon. It can log and display all hard disk activity on a Windows system but it only tells you which sector is being read or written. It’s not easy to tell which file or program is accessing your hard drive using DiskMon.

[ Download FileMon ]

2. AnVir Task Manager

- AnVir Task Manager Free is freeware utility software that gives users a comprehensive set of tools to put them in full control of their computer. It gives you detailed information about every process that is running, and about applications running automatically on Windows startup including all hidden applications.

AnVir Task Manager is a very advanced yet simple to use Task Manager. It has a feature called “Disk Load” at Processes tab where you can see the rate of disk activity which summarizes amount of data read, write and transferred by a process per second.

[ Download AnVir Task Manager Free ]

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