Constant Reading from SSD

Torand · May 26, 2013

Hi guys,

Bit of an odd one. I have an HDD monitor gadget, and recently I've noticed that something is reading around 512kb/s for around a second every 8 seconds from my SSD [sorry if that's a little confusing][see attached image, the constant spikes that you can see on the graph].

I've looked at the Windows resource monitor to see a breakdown of processes and I cannot easily define which process its related to. My assumption is that its related to my Antivirus [even though all that crud is turned off, I like to customise things :) ] OR related to the windows svchost process or similar to that, OS structure files. Although, this activity doesn't come up on my other machines, which is the main reason for my asking.

I've also used Microsoft's own "processexplorer" admin tool, which is slightly more in depth but still doesn't help.

The only reason i'm asking this question is that I've not come across activity like this before on any of my other machines, malwarebytes scans, etc, yield no plausible answers, so I'm not sure.

Concern is that the constant reads will put wear on my SSD [Crucial M4].

Thanks in advance guys.

unidentical · May 28, 2013

I'm not sure what would be doing the reads though AV is a good theory.

As far as wear on the SSD goes though, SSD flash has a finite number of writes, not reads. That is to say the number of times the nand can be overwritten.

Reads should not cause any degradation at all.

One thing to be careful of with SSDs is that they are never defragged. because that will absolutely cause undue wear.

Torand · July 22, 2013

I forgot to come back and alleviate on an answer to this...

It turns out it was the wallpapers cycling in the background on the windows 7 wallpaper carousel, I forgot I had left it on.

Thanks for the info unidentical.

The first thing I do always on a fresh Win. 7 SSD install; disabling the auto defrag'ing schedule, check trim is enabled by bashing the necessary commands through cmd and also disable indexing and do the hibernation fix to clear unnecessary drive space usage.

Good to know about the finite writes and not reads though. I knew it was finite due to the module being overwritten, but didn't know it was only writes and not reads [although that now seems logical anyway]. Thanks!