Windows 10: System and compressed memory high disk usage

It should be ok- I was looking at your first screenshot, where C has some high bursts of activity, but then your fourth shows continuous usage on G/H with little RAM use. So nothing to do with paging.. sorry, too quick off the mark now I've read it again.

 

Any suggestions on where to go from here? I've ran disk checks and everything appears to be healthy on that drive. Even ran defragments as well.

 

You actual read/write throughput seems very low. I'm no expert on the spread of such figures but I just tried copying a large file from my HDD to my HDD (internal) and that ran total around 50Mb/s. I'd suggest exploring that, using a simple copy operation, making sure before you start nothing else is happening.

Compare that with the same operation on your other disks.

Have you checked the SMART params? (E.g. Crystal diskinfo, free).

 

Okay so these tests were very interesting. I copied a 2 gb folder from my SSD to the HDD and the disk time was 100% and would remain there even after the process said it was done. Took about 1 minute for the disk to return to a normal state where I could watch videos again etc. Of course comparing this to the SSD was night and day. I tried to run the read write tests with Crystal Disk and it took so long compared to the SSD. I couldn't even get a number because it felt like the program wasn't working.

I ran the actual program itself and these were the results. Not sure how to interpret these values or if there are any red flags. I'm starting to think that the HDD is just starting to go. It's from a 2 year old laptop and doesn't seem to be performing well in my computer. Should I consider replacing it?

 

Well there's nothing there to suggest replacement.

I suggest you try copying a large file between only your HDDs using file explorer, and watch the throughput with Resource Monitor as before.

If there are differences in throughput between your disks, you could try swapping them round physcally and testing again. Are the all they same type?

I happen to have exactly the same HDD (with an SSD for Windows + programs).

 

I have 2 Samsung SSDs in my computer. OS is installed on the SSD. Not sure if I'm testing properly, but this is the result of copying a file from the SSD to the HDD. Then copying the same file from the G to H partition. Write speeds to the disk never exceed 15 mb/s. Again, it takes a little while for the disk to go from 100 back down to 0% usage even after it says the file has been copied 100%. Sorry if this was the wrong way to go about this. Not sure if I'm doing this right.

 

Hi, here I am copying a file on the same HDD. I.e. from the disk- to the same disk.
I've shown both the task manager and the resource manager.

At the same time as this I could take the screenshot and paste it into Paint without any degradation of performance.




If I understand your system configuration correctly you have at least 2 HDDs - you can do the same and compare them.

If different, try swapping their connections and retry.

 

Copied the file from the disk to the same disk and here are the results over time. The disk starts out fast and then dips very quickly. I only have one HDD. The others are SSDs and I feel like comparing them would be a massive difference, correct? I'm sorry if I'm missing something here.

I also came across people recommending to try different SATA slots like you said. If the HDD performs faster in another SATA slot, does this mean that the slot is faulty? What is the cause of that?

EDIT: Copied from the wrong drives. Fixed the screenshots.

 

Is your E/F drive also a HDD? If so, do the same copy from and to it, and report the throughput.

As regards swapping the drives, it's simply a matter of elimination. If a drive works in one slot but not another, that tends to indicate where the problem lies. Don't forget 'simple' things like cables and connectors either.

 

Nope, E and F is another SSD. I'll go ahead and test out different slots and cables in the morning. Getting pretty late here. If the speeds are the same, is it safe to assume that I should look into a replacement? It seems that this is a hardware and not an OS issue. I believe I have everything configured correctly and the right drivers installed.

 

Ideally you could also swap the HDD for trial purposes if you have one..

And you might be able to connect is as a USB drive to check it out.

 

I don't have a spare unfortunately *Sad

I do have some spare cables though so I'll mess around with that later and try it in different slots. I'll report back later with results.

 

Okay! Much better results now. I changed the cables and plugged it into the same SATA port. The cable that I had didn't seem to lock in properly so I used one of the cables that the motherboard came with and those seem way sturdier. I managed to complete some benchmark tests on the HDD using crystal disk that wouldn't even run properly last night since it was so slow. I also tried to load into Fallout 4 which is a game that is very resource intensive. Waited on load screen for about 10 minutes last night and didn't even manage to load into game. Today after replacing the cable I managed to load in in about 45~ seconds or so which is a massive difference. Here are the results of the benchmark. I believe these speeds are normal for a 5400 RPM HDD. I also did the copy paste of a 1 gb folder from the same HDD to another location in the HDD and watched the range of the write speed. It averaged between 20-30 mb/s and occasionally dipped down to 10. It still takes a little while for the disk to go back down to 0% after the copy operation is over, but this probably isn't an issue I think.

How does this look?




Running the tests again produced slower results, but I think it mirrors how my disk is actually performing compared to the original test. This is a 2.5" laptop HDD so I don't think I can expect higher output?





After a restarting the computer and performing a couple more test runs, the numbers seemed to hover in this range. Will perform more tests when the computer has been running for a few hours.

 

That looks a lot better...*Smile

 

Ahh that's a relief. Ran the test a few more times and the results mirror the last image. Pretty much exactly the same which is reassuring. I'll monitor the performance over the next week and come back and mark as solved/give rep. Thank you so much for sticking with me through this problem. Glad it was such a simple fix and not something worse. *Smile