Ever since I built my new primary Vista desktop I have wondered why the hard drive light seems to dance along with the music as I listen to iTunes. Not giving it much thought, I just assumed that the SATA disk (first one of those for me) either read differently or maybe the disk activity LED on this machine was just more in tune with what was happening in my new rig.
I’m not sure what was different about today, but I was REALLY annoyed at the thought that the disk should have even pretend to work that hard to serve music up to me. I put my mind to work and the solution finally lit the lamp and left me feeling pretty stupid –
When I built this new machine, I completely neglected to exclude my iTunes folder in the AntiVirus applications and each song was being scanned during each play! Add the fact that I use two AV apps (Comodo and AVG), and I was working the disk a lot harder than necessary.
So if you notice a great deal of disk activity while listening to music or using data belonging to a particular application for that matter, you may want to exclude that folder from your real-time AV scanner. 🙂