Excessive disk activity

P. Breathnach

I'm hoping for a bit of help on this one.

My system has been well-behaved until a few weeks ago, and now it appears that the C/D drive is active at a high level a great deal of the time. Resource Monitor shows it spiking to 100% of whatever scale that utility employs, and I hear a near-constant but slightly-variable hum. Performance Monitor seems to tell a different story, telling me that Disk Idle time is 100+<a tiny amount like .256>.

Two other little things:
1. I have an external hard disk, used solely for data backup. It has two partitions. When I wake the system, it detects the two partitions on that disk, and attempts to autoplay, before accepting them for what they are.
2. The system occasionally freezes very briefly, for about a second. This might happen about once an hour, perhaps less.

The system has plenty of capacity, including 12G RAM, and I don't run any stuff that should be resource-hungry - two browsers open, and I use an office suite, a genealogy program, an accounts program, stuff like that. I have not installed any software recently.

My OS is Windows 7 Home Premium, and it is set to update automatically.

Yes, I have scanned for malware, using Malwarebytes.

I suspect that the system is caching non-stop, but I'm no techie. My concern is that I don't want a trashed disk.

I would be grateful for any thoughts about what might be happening, and what I should do about it.

excollier

Do you mean the hard drive is busy - surely the cd / dvd drive will only be busy if there is a disk in it.

P. Breathnach

excollier wrote: »

Do you mean the hard drive is busy - surely the cd / dvd drive will only be busy if there is a disk in it.

I meant the hard disk, which is partitioned into C: and drives. Sorry for the lack of clarity.

CreepingDeath

Are you running out of space on the C: drive ?

Is the recycle bin full ? (Empty it)

Do you have a virus scanner scaning the whole drive ?

Do you have the Windows Search / Indexer service on (usually is by default)?

I'd perform a scan disk and defragment.
But you probably want to backup any important data first, just to be safe.

Also, if you have 12G of RAM, I'd disable the Windows swap drive.
No need for it, and it'll force Windows to use all of your 12Gb of RAM rather than page stuff to the drive.

my3cents

The obvious question is did you install anything including hardware before this started? Think about both software and any devices you may have plugged in that needed drivers?

imitation

Open up the event viewer (win + r evntvwr) check the system log for any errors with a source disk, could be back blocks or a controller error.

maki

CreepingDeath wrote: »

Are you running out of space on the C: drive ?

Is the recycle bin full ? (Empty it)

Do you have a virus scanner scaning the whole drive ?

Do you have the Windows Search / Indexer service on (usually is by default)?

I'd perform a scan disk and defragment.
But you probably want to backup any important data first, just to be safe.

Also, if you have 12G of RAM, I'd disable the Windows swap drive.
No need for it, and it'll force Windows to use all of your 12Gb of RAM rather than page stuff to the drive.

Don't do this. See here.

OP, in resource monitor under the Disk tab, there's a disk activity window. Sort it by Total (B/sec) and it should show you what processes are chewing up your disk.

P. Breathnach

Thanks for the replies.

my3cents wrote: »

The obvious question is did you install anything including hardware before this started? Think about both software and any devices you may have plugged in that needed drivers?

Not that I can recall. No new hardware, and the only software changes have been updates of Windows (automatic) and of reputable things like Acrobat Reader.

CreepingDeath wrote: »

Are you running out of space on the C: drive ?

Far from it. The C: drive is almost empty, and the is about 60% free.

Is the recycle bin full ? (Empty it)

It's empty.

Do you have a virus scanner scaning the whole drive ?

I use Windows protection, and scan from time to time with Malwarebytes. I don't think my system has been seriously compromised at any time. I think I have had to clear out non-critical things about three times in the past two years. I'm a fairly careful surfer.

Do you have the Windows Search / Indexer service on (usually is by default)?

Just ran Microsoft's troubleshooter on it: no problems found.

I'd perform a scan disk and defragment.

All disks are fully defragmented - scandisk is set to run automatically once a week.

Also, if you have 12G of RAM, I'd disable the Windows swap drive.

No need for it, and it'll force Windows to use all of your 12Gb of RAM rather than page stuff to the drive.

That sounds like a good thing. But I don't know how. Can you give me a steer on it, please?

I found something: "Microsoft Teredo Tunneling Adapter has a driver problem". I ran troubleshooter on it, and it reinstalled the driver, but that did not fix it. Might that be linked to the problem?

P. Breathnach

imitation wrote: »

Open up the event viewer (win + r evntvwr) check the system log for any errors with a source disk, could be back blocks or a controller error.

I have looked, and I'm none the wiser! None of the error messages suggests a disk error.

maki wrote: »

Don't do this. See here.

Yes, I have seen else where that there are different views on such a measure. But most of my RAM is unused, and I wonder if there is a way the unused memory can be employed to lighten the load on the disk.

OP, in resource monitor under the Disk tab, there's a disk activity window. Sort it by Total (B/sec) and it should show you what processes are chewing up your disk.

I have looked at that. Things seem to bubble up and down a lot. It doesn't look to me as if any one process is causing more havoc than others.

ressem

In Resource Monitor \ Disk tab
on the right hand side, there'll be two graphs.

The lower should be the disk queue length.
The vertical scale for the graph auto-adjusts based on the maximum values it's encountering.

The scale on this should be 0 to 0.1 when the computer is idling.
Indicating that when a disk request comes in, most of the time it's handled immediately.
When the queue length goes into the 1 to 10 region, it means that there is a backlog of disk work building up.

When it goes into the hundreds then the machine becomes bad at responding to even high priority system calls.

--

Sysinternals Procmon https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb896645.aspx

can help in determining what is calling the disk during these performance spikes. Start it up, go with the default filters, then in the top menubar, have
"Show Filesystem activity" and "Show Process / Thread activity" selected.

DEselect
"Show registry activity" and "show network activity" using their buttons in the menu.

Right clicking on the Column Header bar will allow you to add columns for more information, like duration and "command line" to assist in getting to the cause.

Some of this background stuff is important though, so you'll have to research before trying to kill it off.

---
I'd agree with Maki, in that the swap drive shouldn't be disabled.

The Microsoft Terado driver is to do with Networking and IPv6. Unlikely to be the reason for high disk use.

P. Breathnach

Reporting back:

I left Resource Monitor running constantly, checking from time to time what was happening - in particular when there seemed to be heavy disk usage. I'm still of the opinion that there isn't a single culprit, but I found that $LogFile seemed to generate a lot of action. It's a hidden file, and it seems that Defrag does not operate on hidden files, so if it had become fragmented it could add to the system load. At least, that's what I read into things.

I found a suggestion: run chkdsk with the /f switch. I have faith in MSDOS: it's tried and tested. So I ran it. No errors were reported, but I think chkdsk tidies things up.

It seems to have done some good. Disk activity seems reduced, and I haven't experienced any of the brief system freezes that I described earlier. But it's early days, and I might be fooling myself.

Things are not as sweet and crisp as when the system was new, so I'll keep looking for fixes. But I have fewer annoyances now.

Thanks, everybody, for taking an interest.

[Maybe the next time I get a call from that gentleman with an Indian accent who works in Windows Technical Support, I'll get some more help from him. I may have been too hasty in telling him to f*ck off.]