Excessive Drive Thrashing in Vista
I recently purchased a nice Dell Dimension 9200 Quad Core machine with Raid-0 HDD, running Vista naturally.. I’ve not really had much experience with Vista yet but found that the machine would quite often burst into fits of hardcore disk thrashing for quite a while (i.e. more than 10mins).. this seemed quite strange considering how quick the machine is
Anyway, using the new Reliability and Performance Monitor I could see that a service was writing lots of data to the folder that System Restore uses (i.e. \System Volume Information). Disabling System Restore solved the drive thrashing, however as I am running Vista Business, it also disables the ‘Previous Versions’ feature (this may have been the actual culprit anyway)