Guild Wars 2

My system OS (and GW2) are located on my main drive, an OCZ SSD.

Oddly enough, whenever I’m in game for GW2, I hear what sounds like rather loud HDD seeking activity. I’ll alt-tab out of the game, and it’ll stop. I’m confused on exactly what might be going on.

I’ve checked the usual culprits (anti-virus, disk scans, etc) and can’t seem to find anything that would be causing this. Furthermore, I have power management set so that these drives will spin down after 5 minutes of inactivity – when browsing them with file explorer after alt-tabbing out of the game they take 5-10 seconds to respond, making me think they are in fact powered down.

Anyone else had this, or have an idea of what else could be going on? It doesn’t sound like any sort of system fans, and this is the only game this occurs for, making it unlikely to have anything to do with system load.

It doesn’t seem harmful, however it is quite annoying.

In case it wasn’t clear above, I have 2 secondary drives in my desktop. I know that an SSD wouldn’t be making noise, these two drives are your typical HDD.

Do you have pagefiles on the 2nd HD?

You can use ProcessMonitor to find what program is accessing the 2nd HD.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896645.aspx

I don’t believe so. In advance system settings I have one pagefile for drive c: at 4096MB (used to be 8GB but I reduced it a long time ago to conserve space). Both and E: are set to no pagefile.

I took at look at the help files and running processes on my system quickly. Are you familiar with how to locate where the HDD activity (assuming that’s even what it is) is coming from?

I see this program being useful in the future, so thanks for pointing it out.

Use Process Monitor. Set a filter because there are lots of events.
Set something like Path contains E:\ or something and refresh the list.

When a process or application access something on E:\ you can see it in the log

Alright, done. I did it for and E: to cover both, now when I bring up the process activity summary it seems to show only activities involving access to those HDDs. I’ll run the game again until I hear what I was hearing before (unfortunately it’s not always immediate) and see what’s going on.

Aside from a few system activities, it doesn’t look like too much is going on. GW2 doesn’t show on this list at all for accessing the other drives, and the timestamps for what does show up, doesn’t line up with what I was hearing. (There was noise after the last logged events).

I only notice the sound during GW2, but there’s always a slim chance it’s because it’s more laid-back then some other games.

Maybe it’s GPU fans? I’ll try playing some other games with sound lowered as well as examine the fans on my video cards. I don’t know what else to suspect as there aren’t a whole lot of moving parts in a system!

IMO a GPU Fan and HD seeking are very distinct noise. Not sure what you are actually hearing lol. But it looks like explorer.exe is doing stuff and the HD might not actually read/write the file out of its buffer for a few seconds.

Try filtering out every operation except the file ones

Oh I agree, there’s a vast different to me too between HD seeking and fans spinning up. The confusing part of the sound is that usually hard drive activity isn’t constant. You can hear it, and there’ll be pauses and inconsistencies; which there were none of here. It would just keep going consistantly until I left the game, and my best guess was that being the cause.

I took the side cover off and found that a thermal probe had fallen in close to one of the gpu fans. It seems unlikely, but if the tip of that started to barely rub again the fan as it sped up… well, I have no idea what that would sound like , but I moved it and will keep an eye on whether or not I hear anything else. Being muffled by the side of the case, it could’ve been what I was hearing.

I do know that from monitoring temperatures on a laptop gpu that the noise pattern of starting and stopping seems to fall in place for how long it’d take temps to rise, and it’d only take a few seconds after tabbing out to drop the fans if the temps went down.

I guess I’ll find out soon enough.

It’s definitely related to the fan on my top video card. Tapping the casing interrupts the sound, so something is vibrating intermittently. Annoying. Now to figure out why!

Anyway, thanks for the troubleshooting suggestions above.

There’s something loose with the plastic guarding that holds the fans for one of my gpus. It’s not the fans themselves, but the plastic has something that vibrates. I’d assume its slightly touching the heat-sink fins underneath or something.

Still gonna be annonying, but I can’t do a whole lot without disassembling some of it, and it’s probably not worth the trouble. I can just turn the volume up louder