Need help narrowing down cause of 100% disk use

Okay, the Superfetch solution doesn't seem to have fixed my problem. Time to try some other things...

hsehestedt said:

EDIT: I was typing my response while dalchina responded. Try those suggestions, if that gets you nowhere, please try waht I outlined below to get us some data to start.

Okay, still there? Let's try this.

hsehestedt said:

I agree that it seems odd that the disk is active 100% of the time, but you will want to note that there is a huge difference between % time that the drive is active vs the actual utilization percentage.

As an example, a disk can be active nearly 100% of the time but if it is doing very tiny reads and/or writes it may still barely impact performance.

From the screenshots that you provided, that seems to be exactly what is going on here.

Good to know, and that may be the case some of the time. But the reason I'm spending my precious time to figure this out is that I'm often experiencing dramatic degradation in performance. Slow response from apps, seconds- to minutes-long lockups, apps "whiting out" for a few minutes (not responding), Firefox waiting 10 minutes after launch to load anything but a blank white screen in any tab even though the little loading animation is moving.

hsehestedt said:

Also, I noticed from one of your screenshots that the disk cleanup utility was running, wondering if that might have something to do with it.

Hm, good to know. Something to look into. Another thing that seems to always be running is Windows Defender, which the system doesn't allow me to kill.

hsehestedt said:

Let's take a look at this another way...

Open Task Manager (ALT + CTRL + DEL, then select Task Manager).

Go to the processes tab and click on the Disk column to sort in order of disk usage. Note: Make sure that the arrow in the disk column points down to indicate that highest usage is displayed first. If not, click that column again.

Grab another screenshot - no need to get the whole thing if there are many processes, just the top 10 or so should be plenty.

Go to the performance tab and grab a screenshot there as well. Note: A screenshot can be a little misleading because the numbers can bounce around a lot. The graph portion of the screen helps a lot, but pay particular attention to the Average response time statistic near the bottom of the screen. Give me a rough idea of what the highest number you see there is.

We are mainly interested in the C: drive, but you may want to grab this info for other disks as well.

Let's start there and see where that takes us.

Here are a few screenshots I've taken over the past week or two:










The response time varies a lot. I've seen it go very briefly up into the thousands of milliseconds, though a more typical case is bouncing around in the 20s and 30s with regular spikes up to about 100 or 150.

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Megahertz said:

All modern disks has a Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology (S.M.A.R.T.)
Clear Disk Info or CrystalDiskInfo will retrieve this data log and show the if the disk is healthy.

I would also do a disk check. Open a CMD window and type
chkdsk c: /scan

Hm...what should I make of this?



Disk check didn't find anything wrong.

This seems to be one of those "good news and bad news" scenarios.

The good news is that the system doesn't seem to be reporting any flat out bad sectors or file system errors. However, if you look at the output from Clear Disk Info it indicates that the disk is failing and in particular, you can see a large number of Command Timeouts. That makes sense in view of what I am seeing on the other screenshots. Even with very low disk transfer rates which never even hit 7MB/s you are getting some very slow response times. The one screen showed an average response time of 712 ms which is crazy slow.

I tend to think that the drive itself may be experiencing problems, but if it's really been slow like this for a year I would think that the magic smoke would have escaped by now

You might try booting into safe mode to see if things are any faster - that would eliminate a lot of software from the equation. For example, you might try copying a good deal of data when booted normally and time it. Then do the same thing in safe mode and see if it's any better.

In any case, I would make sure you stay current on backups just to be on the safe side.

You might also try a simple speed test on the HD - something like Crystal Disk Mark:

CrystalDiskMark – Crystal Dew World

Let's see if that also shows really poor performance. You might even compare that with an external disk drive (USB drive) if you have one available to test. It would be interesting to see if poor performance is limited to only the internal drive or if something on the system is also affecting an external drive.

I would suggest downloading and running Sysinternals Process Explorer...

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sys...ocess-explorer

On the toolbar, click on Options > VirusTotal.com > Check VirusTotal.com

Each process will be checked for malware, and the results displayed in a separate column.

On the toolbar, click on View > System Information.

In the Summary section, you'll see a series of live graphs.

Hover your mouse over the peaks on the Disk graph, and you'll see which process is using the highest amount of disk resources.

You can then cross-reference that process to the process list, and get more detail on what it's doing.

hsehestedt said:

This seems to be one of those "good news and bad news" scenarios.

The good news is that the system doesn't seem to be reporting any flat out bad sectors or file system errors. However, if you look at the output from Clear Disk Info it indicates that the disk is failing and in particular, you can see a large number of Command Timeouts. That makes sense in view of what I am seeing on the other screenshots. Even with very low disk transfer rates which never even hit 7MB/s you are getting some very slow response times. The one screen showed an average response time of 712 ms which is crazy slow.

I tend to think that the drive itself may be experiencing problems, but if it's really been slow like this for a year I would think that the magic smoke would have escaped by now

You might try booting into safe mode to see if things are any faster - that would eliminate a lot of software from the equation. For example, you might try copying a good deal of data when booted normally and time it. Then do the same thing in safe mode and see if it's any better.

In any case, I would make sure you stay current on backups just to be on the safe side.

You might also try a simple speed test on the HD - something like Crystal Disk Mark:

CrystalDiskMark – Crystal Dew World

Let's see if that also shows really poor performance. You might even compare that with an external disk drive (USB drive) if you have one available to test. It would be interesting to see if poor performance is limited to only the internal drive or if something on the system is also affecting an external drive.

Thanks! Relieved to hear (if I understand correctly) that the high number of command timeouts doesn't necessarily mean imminent Game Over for the drive. "Status: failing" is a pretty alarming message to see. The problems do seem to have been getting gradually worse over time though, so I guess it could be the hardware problem starting to emerge on top of other software issues that already existed.

Definitely keeping things backed up, though it would still suck big time to lose the drive suddenly (I rely on this machine for my business, and going without while I order a new one would be a bit of a hardship).

I'll try the things you suggested and report back.

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dalchina said:

Unfortunately there are a good many threads on this topic with limited transfer rates as you show on tenforums, and plenty of reports outside tenforums e.g.

100% Disk Usage in Windows 10 Fixed With 15 Tricks

Doesn't seem easy to resolve, alas.

Understood. Thanks for the link. Nice to at least have something like a succinct, comprehensive list of fixes to try.

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OldNavyGuy said:

I would suggest downloading and running Sysinternals Process Explorer...

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sys...ocess-explorer

On the toolbar, click on Options > VirusTotal.com > Check VirusTotal.com

Each process will be checked for malware, and the results displayed in a separate column.

On the toolbar, click on View > System Information.

In the Summary section, you'll see a series of live graphs.

Hover your mouse over the peaks on the Disk graph, and you'll see which process is using the highest amount of disk resources.

You can then cross-reference that process to the process list, and get more detail on what it's doing.

Okay, thanks. I can try that too.

Good day.

Other things to try:

Different SATA cable.
Different SATA Port.

@eLPuSHeR, it's a laptop so a different SATA cable and/or port might not be possible.