HDD grinding noise is loud, but the task manager reports no activity.
HDD grinding noise is loud, but the task manager reports no activity.
I notice the system is consistently making noise even when no HDD is detected, and the task manager reports no activity. The sound pattern resembles breathing every 10 seconds. Using the drive for tasks like copying files doesn’t affect the noise. This issue appears right after Windows 10 starts. I’ve tried disabling Windows search, which seems to be a frequent trigger. Cloning the drive to another storage also produces the same result. Task manager always shows zero activity, and resource monitor only lists usage on the SSD. Network/Internet activity is also zero. I’m considering it might be malware, but no suspicious files were found. The “malware” quarantine didn’t help. There’s no recognizable process in the “whats my computer doing” app. Could a hidden process be using the drive from Task Manager? Any third-party disk monitoring tools might reveal what’s happening?
Verify your windows dashboard and hibernation file position. If your C drive is limited, the page or hibernation file might have shifted to another storage device.
Good ideas, though my system has 178GB available. In the advanced settings there are no page files on other drives. I also ran hwinfo (shows 0 activity) and HDD Sentinel reported 0. I checked if monitoring works by copying a file—activity appeared during copy but not when noise occurs.
I'm really confused right now... It was the middle fan of my GPU! I thought I was wasting time unplugging the drives, but it kept making noise. The issue wasn't in BIOS or safe mode because the GPU drivers with the fan settings I had in Afterburner weren't loading. I can't match the grinding to a particular fan speed, but when I stopped the middle fan by hand, the noise disappeared and I could clearly hear it rubbing against the GPU. These poor Gigabyte fans are a real letdown... The 980 G1? It stopped working about a month before the warranty expired—lucky! Now I'm worried it might fail soon on my 3080. Thanks for helping me see things more clearly. It sounds almost like my hard drive is acting up too!