Avast contiually scanning my Hard Drive!

[stardust4ever]

Hi. I'm running Avast 4.8 on Windows Vista 64bit, Phenom II 955 and 8 gigabytes of RAM. I have noticed that from the time I start my system until I shut it down, the hard drive light is continually flickering as I can also hear perpetual chatter from my hard drive, even when my computer is idling. I suspect that Avast is responsible. When I click in the program window, I notice that the scanner is scanning files, even when/if I'm doing nothing. While I've never noticed any lag from my system whatsoever,as a result, I'm afraid that over days, weeks, and months of usage, this constant activity will unnecessarily shorten the lifespan of my hard drive. It's been my experience that as long as real-time scanning of open files is always turned on, it shouldn't be necessary to continuously scan the hard drive, seeing that as long as everything that ever gets loaded into memory is scaned, the scanner will do it's job without continuous hard drive commotion. Also with the fact that I have 8 gigabytes of RAM installed on my system, which is huge, there is absolutely no foreseeable reason that files on the harddrive should have to be accessed over and over, as once something is loaded into memory, it should not need to be loaded again unless the program using it is closed.

Please, is there any way to keep avast running and protecting my system without without the unnecessary hard drive chatter?
Any input would be appreciated.

[DavidR]

Well avast wouldn't be responsible as it would only be responding to files that are being accessed, so what you need to do is find out what is responsible for that activity, see #### below.

What sensitivity do you have the Standard Shield set to (Normal is the default) ?
So what other security applications do you have running ?
Do you have any administrative tools that clean-up or index files, search indexing, etc. ?

####
From the Standard Shield - Left click on the avast 'a' icon, click the Details... >> button if shown, select the Standard Shield provider > Customize > Advanced - 'Show detailed info on performed actions' this option is off by default. That should give you an indication of what is being scanned and hopefully an idea of what program would be accessing these files.

[norel]

Try disabling the Windows Search service and see if it stops. If you have a lot of files this "service" runs almost constantly. As it does, Avast keeps scanning the whole time. Unless you do a lot of searching and require super fast results, Windows Search is really a waste of resources. This may not be your specific issue but it's worth a shot to try it and see.

[YoKenny]

@norel
I find Windows Vista's Search quite handy and once its index is built hard drive activity slows down and in all the years of using PCs I have never had a hard drive go bad due to normal use.

@stardust4ever
I even have the 2 80GB hard drives from my old dead PIII system that I use as backup storage for my systems that work quite well.

[DavidR]

I too have never had a HDD failure with normal use, the mean time before failure is nowadays quite high. So even with any additional activity with indexing and or scanning such activity I doubt it would impact greatly in the effective life of the HDD.