Excessive Hard Drive Activity

[archived]

I've been noticing that lately my Pluto system's HDD has been grinding a lot.  And by a lot I mean all day, non stop.  Does anyone have any idea why this is?  What I could do to stop it?  What I'd need to check to figure out what's going on?  It's a hybrid system with the installation using default partitioning and file systems on a 60 gb drive.  There's also a 180 gb NTFS drive in that machine, and I'm not sure which one is grinding (though I'm assuming it's the 60, as that's where Pluto is actually installed).

Any ideas?

[archived]

Maybe its swapping? (ie: using the swap file excessively)

How much memory is in the machine and is there more than usual running.

From a command prompt run 'top' and it will give you the most active processes and also tell you their memory use. It also displays total CPU and memory use up the top and total swap use.

That might tell you if there is a particular process using up an excessive amount of memory (and therefore causing swap file activity)

Also, UpdateMedia has changed so maybe that is causing problems.

HTH
Darren