Annoying: Hard drive spinning up

[grandinferno]

I have an SSD and three Green drives in my machine. Obviously the Green drives take a little while to spin up when I access them, but it seems that they're spinning up all the time whenever I access the SSD.

I particularly notice this in Illustrator (where it's most annoying). It just slows everything down randomly and I can hear the hard drive.

I can't find any indication as to why this is happening. Any ideas? It must be a setting somewhere in Windows or a motherboard thing. Like the mechanical hard drives are on the same chain as the SSD like in the master/slave IDE days.

...or maybe I'm just an idiot and it's something rudimentary. I don't know.

Edit: It's not a scratch disk thing in Illustrator btw.

[Milenko]

Windows indexing? Shot in the dark.

[grandinferno]

Nah I turned that off when I put the SSD in.

[Harbinger]

adobe automatically setting a scratch disk other than the main system disk, for speed benefits?

[grandinferno]

Nah checked that already.

[Harbinger]

adobe ignoring your preferences because it's essentially written for mac people and adobe knows better?

[BrAiN DaNcE]

Process Monitor

Should let you see what is accessing information from the disk when it spins up.

[grandinferno]

Awesome. Will that a go. Thanks!

[grandinferno]

Ok. So Illustrator is writing tmp files to one of my Green drives, despite me setting my scratch as my SSD. Apparently (not sure if it's Adobe or Windows) if an app is writing temp files by default it will find the drive with the most space (which it has).

Apparently this will fix it:

In addition to creating a C:\TEMP folder on your hard drive, you'll need to set two User environment variables, TEMP and TMP.

In Windows 7 here's how:

1. Click Start and type Environment into the search box.

2. When Edit environment variables for your account comes up, click it.

3. Look at the top list (User variables). If you see TEMP in the list, double click it. If not, press the [ New... ] button.

4. Set these values... Variable name: TEMP Variable value: C:\TEMP (make sure and not include any spaces)

5. Repeat steps 3, 4 for variable TMP

6. OK out.

7. Reboot your computer.

This will throw any temp files into those folders.

Thanks heaps for the heads up Brain. Not sure whether it will solve my problem, but it should. Will try now.

[grandinferno]

Hmmmm. So strange. It seems to have diverted some temp files but not others. Illustrator is faster now but not all the time. It's now even more random than before. Either that or my perception could be skewed.

Process Monitor says Illustrator is now writing temp files to C and H drive.

Oh... and not to the temp folders I specified above.

The only other thing I can think of is malware, but it's actually the trial straight from Adobe. :\

[grandinferno]

Ok I just closed down Process Monitor and it lagged because the HDD was spinning up. ffs.