Whenever g Google Chrome is open my HDD spins really fast

Question

I have a Windows 7 64 bit machine freshly installed. When I open the latest version of google chrome, the hard drive is constantly being accessed. I know because it makes a loud annoying noise. The hard drive is a samsung 2Tb HDD. It's fairly new and I got it for cheap so I think the drive itself is very noisy. The noise only happens when chrome is open though.

goes away the instant i close chrome. So i've switched the firefox for now, but I'm keen to find out why.

the 2tb hard drive is mounted as my h:\ and I changed chrome's downloads and my documents to sit straight on that drive, because my c:\ is a 60gb SSd, too small to fit everything.

Anyone ever experienced anything like this ?

Here's some details to help get a clear picture

Operating System    Windows Windows 7
Screen Resolution   1920 x 1080
Web Browser     Chrome 16.0.912.63
Browser Size    781 x 471
IP Address  220.239.108.80
Color Depth     32
Javascript  Enabled
Flash Version   11.1.102
Cookies     Enabled
User Agent  Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/535.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/16.0.912.63 Safari/535.7

HD - samsung hd204ui ata

write caching enabled

Solution

This may be because Chrome uses the hard-drive to cache everything- which seems to cause problems with installing it on a thumb drive (slow write speeds) and annoyingly LOUD harddrives!

This has been reported to Google in these issues

http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=19510

http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=84913

A workaround would be to start the brower in Private Browsing (In Cognito?) mode, which doesn't cache anything. if you can live without browser history that is :). See if the harddrive sounds better in this mode

Comments

[Jason]

Intresting! Private browsing unfortunately doesn't seem to solve the problem. I have 16gb of ram, i wish chrome would use it. Oh well. I spose I'll swap to FF for now. so disappointing :/ Thanks

[Jason]

Check this out - create a ram disk drive and have chrome store everyting there superuser.com/questions/370039/…