Clean Install - Disk at 100%

pbc · 17 Jul 2016

Seems several people are having this issue. I clean installed Windows 10 64 bit on 3 of my laptops. Two of them have spinning disks, one has an SSD.

The one with the SSD is fine, disk usage sits under 10% when idle. The other two, on the other hand, are constantly between 85-100%, and causing simple things like web page surfing to be very painful as it constantly hangs.

After googling the issue, I have tried all of the following to no avail:

1. Disable Notifications & actions in the All Settings/System section
2. Disable Windows search in services.msc
3. Disable SuperFetch in services.msc
3. Set SuperFetch and Prefetch values to nil in regedit.exe
4. Adjusted the pagefile settings to a min of 1x the memory and 2x the memory max
5. Tried this solution here ... https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3083595

Below is a screen shot of my task manager/disk usage rank. If anyone has any other ideas ... greatly appreciated!

Clean Install - Disk at 100%-capture.png

simrick · 17 Jul 2016

Have you tried turning off Fast Startup?
Fast Startup - Turn On or Off in Windows 10 - Windows 10 Forums
.

pbc · 18 Jul 2016

I have not.. Read through the thread, is this a known culprit of high disk usage?

Ztruker · 18 Jul 2016

Windows Update and Windows Defender scanning the drive can do that but it should settle down after a bit.

simrick · 18 Jul 2016

pbc said:

I have not.. Read through the thread, is this a known culprit of high disk usage?

It can be sometimes. FYI:

To understand what this is/does (it was first introduced in Windows 8):
“Fast Startup (aka: hybrid boot or hybrid Shutdown) is a new feature in Windows 8 to help your PC start up faster after shutting down. When turned on, Windows 8 does this by using a hybrid shutdown (a partial hibernate) method that saves only the kernel session and device drivers (system information) to the hibernate (hiberfil.sys) file on disk instead of closing it when you shut down your PC. This also makes the hiberfil.sys file to be much smaller than what hibernate would use (often 4GB or more). When you start your PC again, Windows 8 uses that saved system information to resume your system instead of having to do a cold boot to fully restart it. Using this technique with boot gives a significant advantage for boot times, since reading the hiberfile in and reinitializing drivers is much faster on most systems (30-70% faster on most systems tested). If you have a motherboard with UEFI, then fast startup will be even faster.”