Yousuf Khan wrote
Rod Speed wrote
Yousuf Khan wrote

I've often noticed that sometimes my boot hard disk goes crazy, disk
activity light flickers constantly, system becomes unresponsive, but
there's no particular process hogging the processor cores. I managed
to watch one such incident while Hard Disk Sentinel was present in
memory, and when I looked at the boot disk in the Performance tab, it
showed 100% activity, but data transfer was down near zero.
Obviously, I had to reboot the computer to get it back to normal.

I'm talking about Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit in this case, but I've seen similar things happen under Windows XP Pro
32-bit in the past too.

That can be just the drive retrying on marginal sectors.

Post the Everest SMART report on that drive.

Here it is:

***report start***

[ Hitachi HDT721010SLA360 (STF604MH0UR52B) ]

01 Raw Read Error Rate 16 99 99 65537 OK: Value is normal
02 Throughput Performance 54 132 132 113 OK: Value is normal
03 Spin Up Time 24 146 146 25756040 OK: Value is normal
04 Start/Stop Count 0 100 100 408 OK: Always passing
05 Reallocated Sector Count 5 100 100 0 OK: Value is normal
07 Seek Error Rate 67 100 100 0 OK: Value is normal
08 Seek Time Performance 20 125 125 33 OK: Value is normal
09 Power-On Time Count 0 99 99 12906 OK: Always passing
0A Spin Retry Count 60 100 100 0 OK: Value is normal
0C Power Cycle Count 0 100 100 368 OK: Always passing
C0 Power-Off Retract Count 0 100 100 409 OK: Always passing
C1 Load/Unload Cycle Count 0 100 100 409 OK: Always passing
C2 Temperature 0 166 166 22, 36 OK: Always passing
C4 Reallocation Event Count 0 100 100 0 OK: Always passing
C5 Current Pending Sector Count 0 100 100 0 OK: Always passing
C6 Off-Line Uncorrectable Sector Count 0 100 100 0 OK: Always passing
C7 Ultra ATA CRC Error Rate 0 200 200 0 OK: Always passing

***report end***

That drive is fine, so its not that.

Another thing I noticed is that during this time, the System's own SVCHOST.EXE program is using up a lot of memory
too, over 300MB by itself!

Are you saying that it doesnt when that isnt happening with the drive ?

Well, I don't normally check out the size of this program, but when I have done so, it's usually 30-50% of that size,
i.e. between 100MB to 150MB.

Likely it is that, but since svchost.exe is used for hosting a lot of stuff, its not necessarily bad.

Have a look at svchost.exe with google and you will find its quite complex what it can be used for.