It is most likely Windows Indexing Service (search) Thrashing the drive.
Turn it off!

most likely Windows Indexing Service (search) Thrashing the drive.

Already done away with.

I've now begun to run Milkyway half of the time just to give my hard drive a rest. I have flashed the latest eVGA BIOS on the mobo. Still no answer to why my hard drive thrashes under GPUGRID.

Anyone?

I just noticed something. The drive noise stops when I scroll down in the forum. Ever so briefly, but this could be a clue.

Perhaps Boinc is Writing to the Disk too often?
Look at the settings. They should be Tasks Checkpoint to Disk at Most Every 60 seconds. I usually up this to 2 or 3 minutes.

Open Boinc in Advanced View and selest, Advanced Preferences, Disk and Memory Usage. Also check around the other settings there.

It still sounds like the disk is caching something. If your sure it is not Windows Indexing Services, it might be a disk defragmenter running in the background, a disk sweeper, or an antivirus product.

Try using Task Manager to see what processes are running and look them up if you dont know what they are.

Perhaps Boinc is Writing to the Disk too often?
Look at the settings. They should be Tasks Checkpoint to Disk at Most Every 60 seconds. I usually up this to 2 or 3 minutes.

Open Boinc in Advanced View and selest, Advanced Preferences, Disk and Memory Usage. Also check around the other settings there.

It still sounds like the disk is caching something. If your sure it is not Windows Indexing Services, it might be a disk defragmenter running in the background, a disk sweeper, or an antivirus product.

Try using Task Manager to see what processes are running and look them up if you dont know what they are.

Tasks Checkpoint... is set to 300 seconds. I increased the maximum disk space to 50GB which should include space for the kitchen sink. Click on read prefs. - no change.

Windows Seach service is turned off.

The only other software using CPU time is taskmgr, at a whopping 1% occasionally. No antivirus issues (I run the same software on 5 rigs.), no disk defragmenter, no disk sweeper, no bloody hand under the table, etc.

The rig in question is pretty much loaded with Vista 64 Home Premium, BOINC and a few games gathering dust.

I noticed something else. Now that I am running two cuda projects (Milkyway and GPUGRID), sometimes a Milkyway and a GPUGID project will be running simultaneously. When one of each is running, the sound level from hard drive usage is approximately half the noise of two GPUGRID projects running at the same time. As I stated before, two Milkyway projects running together makes no appreciable hard drive noise.

OK, I think this is a Virtual Memory / Paging issue, even though you have 12GB RAM and are using 64bit Vista SP2!
Try setting the Virtual Memory to the same as the Physical Memory, by diabling paging, and see if it makes any difference.

To change VM:
Start, Right click on Computer, select Properties,
Advanced System Settings,
In the System Properties Window select the Advanced Tab,
Under Performance select Settings...
Advanced
Virtual Memory, Change
and just make the VM identical to the Total RAM.

Unselect, Automatically Manage Paging File Size for all Drives
then select no paging file.

Note the warning message!

OK, I did that.

No more paging file. Also, no change in the hard drive noise either.

Rebooted with new settings, still no change.

Restoring page file.

Good guess, though.

Have you tried looking at Task Manager, and viewing the optional columns, like I/O Read/Write, and I/O Read/Write Bytes.

On my XP system, the real-time virus scanner has read over a terabyte since I last rebooted - that's several multiples of the whole hard disk size. BOINC.exe has read 725MB, and written just under 400MB. Einstein has read 1.3GB, and SETI under 2MB.

That's the sort of comparison you could be looking for. More reads/writes = more noise.

Have a good look and see what is going on.

Task Manager, Processes, View, Select Columns,
Select Page Faults, and anything else you want to look into.

You can Right Click on a Task and select, End Process, to see if it makes any difference - you should be able to identify your loud task that way, assuming the issue is not a GPUGrid write to disk issue, or directly related to the hard disk.

P/S If this does not work, make sure you dont have a screen saver or desktop background that keeps changing/playing and you might want to have a look in the Bios for HDD settings and check for any pending Boinc updates that resolve writing to disk problems or noise issues.

O/T For anyone running GPUGrid who has automatic updates on, turn it Off - It kills tasks following the forced restarts, and resets some system changes to their defaults.