Windows 7 Disk useage 100%

S

Shockey

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I noticed a major slow down and programs being sluggish when opening and firefox hanging when browsing and opening tabs. Also noticed that my hard drive light has yet to shut off.

Looking at my resource monitor it almost at 100% the entire time. :confused:

This is a fresh install (only few days old) windows trying to index all my files or something :confused:
 
Windows 7 does NOT do indexing at 100% CPU/disk activity, nor Superfetch either - that happened with Vista but those services are tuned to be way way less aggressive in Windows 7. Besides, the indexing is effectively disabled on Windows 7 by default anyway and requires some manual adjustment to work anywhere near the levels it did in Vista and even so it's still far less aggressive in terms of actual disk usage.

Superfetch only works when apps are actually used for a bit - while it may start its designed task of monitoring, Superfetch doesn't really show its true benefits for many days if not weeks after an installation of Windows 7 (and Vista, for that matter). You've got to install apps and actually use them on a fairly regular basis for the benefits to begin to show as Superfetch monitors their usage and your behavior with those apps when they're in operation, etc.

There's something else going on with that system...
 
http://tinypic.com/r/124a1d2/6

an image of resource monitor showing disk usage.

this started out as windows accessing page file. I then disabled the automatically manage page file for drivers. That seemed to stop windows from accessing the page file. Still running slow and sluggish.
 
That Disk activity (the graph on the right, second from the top) shows less than 1MB/s of usage which is practically nothing going on. If you're using that light blue portion that says "100% Active Highest Time" as your reference, that's just a label to show you that when the light blue line appears on the graph that's using the max capable of the disk; currently as I just stated the activity shown by that graph is between 0 and 1MB/s (as measured by the scale along the right side).

That picture basically says "Disk activity is barely happening with far less than 1MB per second of data being read or written to the disk." The one line of activity for "System" shows activity happening with Firefox's sqlite database and that's only 30,621 bytes per second... that's not megabytes, that's just plain old bytes, basically nothing at all - it's showing what, about 56KB/s.

If you were to add up the entire "Total B/s" column (furthest to the right) you wouldn't even get the 1MB mark so, maybe this was a bad pic to use as a visual representation of actual disk activity. :) CPU activity is at 3%, network usage is negligible, RAM usage the same based on almost no hard faults at all happening.

That "100% Highest Active Time" reading confuses people sometimes, they read it the same way some folks read "System Idle Time" in Task Manager and freak out when it's 98-99% constantly - it's a measure of how much the machine is actually doing nothing at all - in other words how idle it really is - but they read it backwards and think it means their system is constantly running full bore.

Not saying that's the case here but, the pic doesn't show anything that I'd even classify as unusual. Disabling aspects of Windows, especially Windows 7, is simply not a recommendation I nor many others would make as well. Doing so basically "breaks" the OS because you're turning off aspects that are designed to work as functional parts of the whole.

You don't cut off your fingers just cause you ain't using 'em for some purpose... a bit extravagant for an analogy but, there it is.
 
Hi Friends, i too am having the same problem: Certain activities will cause the system to apparently hang for several seconds, while i get the twirling blue circle mouse pointer thing, then after awhile (15, 30 seconds) things will resume.

During the "hang" time, the first thing i noticed was the hard disk light staying on. Bringing up Resource Monitor shows that on the Disk Activity screen, the hang period EXACTLY corresponds to the blue line being pegged at 100%. The green area on the graph comes and goes, often to 100%, without seeming to have an effect. At least since the green area does not get pegged to the top of the graph for any appreciable amount of time it doesn't seem to have any effect.

Bahamut seems to mention that the "100% Highest Active Time" means "100% doing nothing," but it seems on my computer to be at least a symptom of sluggishness. What I have yet to determine from looking around the forums is WHAT, then, exactly, SHOULD i be looking at to determine what is causing the slowdown? If the key is in the Disk Activity monitor, do I look at Total B/s or Response Time?

fwiw, i'm using Raid 1 with two 500-G drives, about 30% full, on a computer that is only a couple months old, and this problem just recently appeared.

Thanks for any advice anyone can offer!
 
Same problem here on a friend's. Windows 7 Ultimate 32, HP Prebuilt with AMD 4600+ X2 2GB DDR2 6150LE (disabled) and HD4670. Can't find the problem; it's probably nothing that's installed (everything looks normal). Auto defrag is disabled, auto AV scans are disabled, Superfetch doesn't do this stuff, and the hard drive access comes and goes. In some cases, it seems that it takes 20 min before the drive stops getting accessed.

It's not because it's a WD Green. Drive is a WD3200JS, which as far as I can tel, it's a regular Caviar SE.

It's not chipset drivers.

Resource Monitor shows the blue line maxing out while the hard drive

The problem only showed up a couple days ago, and yet the only thing that's changed is an update to iTunes. It wasn't a hardware change that prompted this 4670 installed two weeks ago). This problem's baffling me.
 
Sort by total bytes per second. Usually when I see this it's the pagefile getting hit.
 
Update: Friend seemed to figure it out himself? His computer did a disk check, and worked itself out. Try running a chkdsk /f from the recovery console.
 
Hi Friends...

Leman: i ran chkdsk and now it seems to be worse. :|

Computercatz: that article now seems to be a mostly blank page. If i'm not running Firefox will your tweaks have any effect?

Based on something i saw somewhere, i disabled Windows Search in msconfig. Now i don't see the file windows.edb at the top of the Disk Activity list, but it doesn't seem to have slowed down the problem. Computer mfr tech support says, "1) Reinstall Windows. If that doesn't work, 2) It may be a hard disk problem." Neither of which I'm looking forward to dealing with. If I know the reinstall would help, then I wouldn't mind spending 1/2 day of precious time screwing with it.

Anything else show up on anyone's radar? Thanks
 
Update: The friend tried reinstalling Windows. It didn't work. Running Windows in Safe Mode, however, does seem to stop the constant hard drive access.

It's a bit up in the air whether it's a hard drive or Windows problem right now. It's not like his drive is a WD Green (which wouldn't be causing 100% disk usage), and everything about his computer seems normal.
 
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