Windows 10: Disk utilization (I/O) routinely at 100 % in windows 10

It seems recently that my Hard drive utilization consistently stays between 90% and 100%. I have shut down as much back ground services as I can find and stopped as many sartup services as I could see that weren't directly OS related. However disk utilization sits very high on my alienware laptop purchased November 2011. It is going on around 5 years old in November and probably need a new one, but, it's still o.k. for most things. 8 core processor at around 3 Ghz I 7 processor, 8 gig of Ram and 7200 RPM hard drive with Nvidia 555 graphics card.

The computer has run hot enough to actually cause a physical burn on my leg. The memory, cpu, and other activities generally at 0 to 30%. However disk I/O is normally 90-100%. If I can get the disk I/O to calm down then the computer runs pretty decent, but, that is rare.

With the Disk I/O so high, just running anything, applications that used to run fast like Office are slow. This seems to be only an issue with running windows 10. I didn't have this type of issue with Windows 7.

I'm sitting at 150-200 GB free out of 500GB. Scan disk and defrag run weekly. Auto updates run routinely on windows. Any suggestions on what I should be looking for? I have run Lavasoft's ad aware (and removed it) and AVG virus scan, and aside from the normal cookies and things like that there's no sign of viruses.

Everything seems optimized, but the hard disk I/O seems to slow everything down and I'm not sure what it's actually reading and writing... all the time!

:)

 

No storage & i dont know why?

in disk management

Disk o partition 1 260mb 100%

Disk o partition 4 979mb 100%

window (c 1.6gb 6%

 

100% disk usage on startup (Windows 10)

I'm sorry. The page I meant to link was Windows 10 100% Disk Usage on startup.

The key post is Deepika Gowda who explains how to use Task Manager to see what processes are doing disk I/O. Here is the key part of what he had to say:

• Open Task Manager and click on Details tab.
• Right click the columns headers and click "Select Columns".
• From the "Select Columns" window, check: I/O Reads, I/O Writes, I/O read bytes, I/O write bytes and then click OK.
• Now the columns will be added to the view and will display how much each process is utilizing from the hard disk.
• Sort by I/O read bytes or I/O write bytes by clicking on the column header to see which process is utilizing the Hard Drive most.

 

Please post a screenshot or clear photo of your task manager, highest resource using processes at the top (click the tab at the top of the relevant column to organise it).

Do a clean boot, then report your disk usage.
If still high, boot to Safe Mode then report your disk usage.

Please complete your system specs including your laptop model number etc
System Specs - Fill in at Ten Forums - Windows 10 Forums

Check with Alienware if your model is approved for use with Win 10 and advise.

Which AV are you using?

 

The tag says, Alienware P18G001
computer info:





I'll try booting clean and see what happens.

 

P.s. The disk is actually operating better than expected right now, but I left the computer on over night, and then it tends to run better. than if I shut it down then start it up. But, anything could trigger the disk usage, and usually it's system that is doing the most I/O.

 

Here's an approach to digging further, but try a clean boot first to simplify things and reduce what's running:
How to Fix Svchost.exe High CPU Usage

Sometimes this works:
From an admin command prompt
[Windows key + X, click command prompt (admin)]
chkdsk C: /F
Your PC will need to restart.
Make sure the result is clear or fixed- else do not proceed.
Post back the result, which you can get after a restart as follows:
How do I see the results of a CHKDSK that ran on boot? - Ask Leo!

From an admin command prompt
Run "sfc /scannow"
After this, enter
"Dism /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth".

 

I ran the chkdsk, no bad sectors and no disk issues. Ran the sfc, and let it finish (all in clean boot) and it found no integrity violations.

running the DISM tool as well. However, disk usage by SvcHost is still high... even with the clean boot...

 

You'll need to follow the analysis in the link I posted..

 

Just to throw something into this thread...

I have two laptops, one of which is old (10yrs) with a 120Gb drive running the 32bit version of 10. This morning it was running at pretty 100% disk usage for a 30 minutes plus. The 'culprit' seems to be Defender and malware scans it does automatically. The activity suddenly ceased and fell to near zero while at the same time a notification popped up saying something like 'No threats, your PC has been scanned 3 times'.

I would liken this behaviour to the good old days of running Vista with 1Gb RAM. Its all very much like that in feel and responsiveness while the disk thrashing occurs.

My more modern laptop with an SSD never seems to exhibit anything like this. I get the same notifications occasional but I'm never aware of any reduction in performance.

Whatever goes on I think is very system specific and a totally unproven/unprovable hunch is that it might be driver related with system interrupts coming into the equation.

 

@Mooly Defender - in my experience- can exhibit high CPU use- this case is not that as you can see from the task man. screenshot.

For servicehost.exe issues careful analysis is required- as you say, to find the specific cause.

 

I've reviewed the SVCHost article, I'll try that next tonight. I'm curious what I find. I'm finding that every few times I boot up the windows 10 circle of dots just sit there. Sometimes this happens when the computer has installed updates, it'll just sit there and never boot. I let it sit there yesterday about 30-45 minutes and it never finished booting. So, I powered it off completely and then back on and it booted just fine. I suspect, but am not sure, that what's slowing things down in the processes may be influencing whether the computer successfully boots or not. Sadly, having served me well for exactly 5 years as of thanksgiving, it may be that this alienware laptop may be on it's last leg of hope! However, I'm a suffering optimist... When it comes to technical issues, I just refuse to call it dead. I wants spent 10-12 hours working on getting an Iomega Zip drive to load in a Linux Kernel when they first came out. After 10 -12 hours of reimaging and reloading the linux Kernel I successfully got it to work, and used it once thereafter... *Smile Heh.

So, I will check out what's running in the system processes. If that doesn't work, I'm guessing the final step would be to completely fdisk and format the drive and reinstall 10. I may stop short of that... My optimism only runs so far. *Smile

 

It's quite an old laptop, and not approved by DELL for upgrade to '10... which may have nothing whatsoever to do with the problem you're seeing..
http://www.dell.com/support/article/...4#Alienware-NB

More ideas:
Abnormally high CPU usage from svchost.exe - Microsoft Community
"
Get two programs: Process Explorer, and Process Monitor. Anytime you run these, make sure you run as administrator.
Using task manager, find the PID of the task that is causing problems. Then open Process Monitor and create a filter to display only results with that PID, as well as anything else you want to specify (ex., only display read/write, etc.)
After you capture for a bit, you will have a very thorough list of everything that has happened with that PID. Make sure you are able to view two specific columns of information: TID and Duration.


At this point, I would recommend saving the Process Monitor output as a CSV file and opening it with Excel. Then you can use a few quick formulas and sorting to find which TID(s) are taking the longest. (If your not good with Excel, feel free to PM me your CSV file and I can help with this part.)


From there, you can use Process Explorer (important to run as admin) to locate the PID that is causing issues. If you double click the PID you can get more information, including a list of threads (and their corresponding TIDs) and determine what module (probably a dll file) corresponds with the problem TID. From that, you should be able to determin ewhich service specifically is causing problems, and either disable it or take whatever steps necessary to fix it."