Who is reading my hard drive? (svchost)

Question

I am using Windows 7 Pro. Using Process Monitor tool I see that Windows is constantly reading stuff and writing stuff to the hard drive.

Most of the time under Process Name I can see what program is reading what. I am not always happy about what I see, as i.e why is process named Chrome.exe reading stuff when I am not actively using it? Why are these various programs constantly reading and writing to various registry paths? And so on. But no matter, at least I know what software it is, so I can uninstall it or put blame on it if I need to.

But one process bugs me the most. It is svchost.exe. It is reading a lot of things, and I want to know more about who and what is behind svchost. i.e.

Question:

How do I find out what is the actual process/program that instructs svchost to read this or that file?
I want to gather information to help me answer questions like "how do I turn off X", "how do I minimize writing from X", "Do I even need X"?

Note: this is part of my larger goal to minimize writing to HDD, because am installing SSD on my machine as an OS & Program only disk, and want to minimize I/O.

this looks like Superfetch reads data into RAM to improve performance. — magicandre1981, Jul 02 '14 at 04:07
Exactly as @magicandre1981 said. Also that's valid, non-off-topic question. I ran into same issue here. — Sanya_Zol, Oct 17 '17 at 15:39

score 3 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 01 '14 at 23:28

3

As far as I know, scvhost is just a system process for Windows. See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svchost

You might be able to tinker with various Windows services but I think for the most part, it is what it is.

I wouldn't worry too much about I/O for your SSD. Unless you're doing constant, unusually disk-intensive work, I can't imagine that your SSD would be affected too greatly.

answered Jul 01 '14 at 23:28

mhashizume

31
3

Upvoted, but with one comment. I fear _might_ be able to tinker is not strongly enough worded. – Get-HomeByFiveOClock Jul 02 '14 at 07:33

score 1 · Answer 2 · edited Jun 11 '20 at 10:02

It is a system process that "hosts" Services, and these Services may not necessarily be System services. A service is usually just a process that runs in the background continuously

Try Process Explorer (by SysInternals also)

Right-click, go to a process's Properties and view the Services tab.

You can also get a bit more info in plain old Windows

In Resource Monitor...

(You can open it through Task Manager, on the Performance tab) Go to the Disk tab, and look in the Disk Activity section. The "Image" (process) will be svchost.exe, but it will have a row for each different file the process is using, and the filename and location may give you an idea what it's doing.

Another tip: in Task Manager's Processes list you can go to Options and add a column called Command Line. This shows you the full path and arguments used to start processes, which can give you a quick hint as to what these generic processes are doing.

Who is reading my hard drive? (svchost)

2 Answers2