Windows 10: Windows 10 100% Disk Activity; Little I/O but in a Pattern

I recently completed a difficult reinstall of Windows 10 on my Dell XPS 8700. I got over the final hurtle by completely disabling any RAID so that the SSD and HDD were separate devices. I also loaded the latest Intel Drivers during the install.


The system has been stable except for a problem that occurs every 20 minutes or so. I can't paste a picture of the Task Manager to illustrate but will describe it. My HDD, which has the OS loaded, jumps to 100% activity with no I/O except for every 14 seconds. Then there is a short burst period of read/write in a perfect pyramind. Never registers more than 100 KB/s. However, the average response time jump to 10's of thousands of seconds.


During this period, all running applications show to a crawl. Web browsers work until they've appeared to run out of cached data. Email goes into 'Not Responding' when trying to open a new email.


Looking at the Resource Monitor, there are a lot disk activity where the response time is in the 10's of thousands of seconds.


Using the Resource Manager CPU and DISK I've tried to find a pattern, file, process that could be culprit. So far nothing.


I've searched the web and attempted some fixes. My pagefile is on the SSD but there is little activity. I have 16GB of memory and rarely get over 12GB of use.


The behavior is like there is a process/function that wakes up, issues a blocking synchronous I/O, and every 13 seconds performs some reads and writes. It's the static behavior of the duration and the 13 second I/O pattern which leads me to believe it is driver/software issue.


Everything is up to date. The disks are managed under Intel's Rapid Storage Technology that is installed on the XPS 8700. It is designed to support RAID but as mentioned, I've completed disabled that.


Any suggestions well.


Thanks

:)

 

Windows 10 100% disk usage problem

Hi Jae,

Thank you for responding.

I suggest you to try the below steps and check if it helps.

Step 1: First of all, take a note of the processes or applications that is running when the computer runs with high disk usage. Also, we need to find the applications that are running at startup.

Follow the steps to check for the processes under Task Manager:

• Press Ctrl+Shift+Esc to open Task Manager.
  
• Click on Processes tab. Check if any of the processes consumes high memory usage.

Bad sectors on the hard drive can be a cause for high disk usage.

Check which process is utilizing the Hard Disk on Windows 8.1, you may try the following steps.

• 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.

Step 2: If you have not run the 'check disk' scan or tried optimizing the drive, follow the steps from this article.

Improve performance by optimizing your drive

(Note: This applies to Windows 10 also.)

Important: While performing check disk on the hard drive, if any bad sectors are found on the hard drive, it tries to repair that sector and any data available on that might be lost.

Hope it helps. Feel free to get back to us for any further queries or issues related to Windows Operating System, we will be happy to help you.

Thank you.

 

Windows 10 100% Disk Usage on startup.

Hi,

Thank you for responding.

I suggest you to try the below steps and check if it helps.

Step 1: First of all, take a note of the processes or applications that is running when the computer runs with high disk usage. Also, we need to find the applications that are running at startup.

Follow the steps to check for the processes under Task Manager:

• Press Ctrl+Shift+Esc to open Task Manager.
  
• Click on Processes tab. Check if any of the processes consumes high memory usage.

Bad sectors on the hard drive can be a cause for high disk usage.

Check which process is utilizing the Hard Disk on Windows 8.1, you may try the following steps.

• 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.

Step 2: If you have not run the 'check disk' scan or tried optimizing the drive, follow the steps from this article.

Improve performance by optimizing your drive

(Note: This applies to Windows 10 also.)

Important: While performing check disk on the hard drive, if any bad sectors are found on the hard drive, it tries to repair that sector and any data available on that might be lost.

Hope it helps. Feel free to get back to us for any further queries or issues related to Windows Operating System, we will be happy to help you.

 

100% disc activity issue

Hi Deep,

Thank you for posting in Microsoft Community, we appreciate your interest in Windows 10.

From description I understand that you are unable to work with your computer as expected. We will help you to resolve the issue.

These issues might occur due to applications or services running at the startup on the computer. Bad sectors on the hard drive or outdated and incompatible drivers might also cause such issues.

1. Which software are you using to monitor the hard disk activity?

2. Do you get any error message on the computer?

I suggest you to try the below steps and check if it helps:

Step 1: First of all, take a note of the processes or applications that is running when the computer runs with high disk usage. Also, we need to find the applications that are running at startup.

Follow the steps to check for the processes under Task Manager:

•Press Ctrl+Shift+Esc to open Task Manager.

•Click on Processes tab. Check if any of the processes consumes high memory usage.

Bad sectors on the hard drive can be a cause for high disk usage.

Check which process is utilizing the Hard Disk on Windows 8.1, you may try the following steps.

• 
  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.
  

Step 2: If you have not run the 'check disk' scan or tried optimizing the drive, follow the steps from this article.

Improve performance by optimizing your drive

(Note: This applies to Windows 10 also.)

Important: While performing check disk on the hard drive, if any bad sectors are found on the hard drive, it tries to repair that sector and any data available on that might be lost.

Also, I suggest you to refer to the suggestion by Arpan Kashyap from the following link.

Windows 8 keeps slows down to 100% disk usage and hangs.

Reference: Troubleshoot blue screen errors

Also, Free up drive space
in Windows 10

Hope it helps. Feel free to get back to us for any further queries or issues related to Windows Operating System, we will be happy to help you.