Windows 8 using 100% of HDD with high average response times and low read/write speed

Question

Hi There,

Since I upgraded to Windows 8 (in January), I have intermittently experienced freezes, and general performance dips. Upon investigating I found that when this occurred, my Hard Drive was showing as 100% Active Time, with a low Read and Write Speed (could be as low as 10 KB/s or as high as 40MB/s) and an Average Response time well into the 1000's (ms).

This is an example https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/23428568/100%25%20HDD.png.

The same thing happens on all the Hard Drives when they're in use. Since it originally started happening, it has only become worse and more frequent. I had thought it may have been a heat problem, but it never gets above 40-50c on the HDD.

All in all.. i'm very confused and really looking for any help you can provide because it's really affecting my daily usage...

Computer Model - Alienware M15X Laptop

OS - Windows 8 Pro 64Bit

Thanks in advance :)

Oliver

Answer 1

It is incredible that Microsoft hasn't been able to fix this. Today, after 3 days of formatting, partitioning, uninstalling, installing, updating, upgrading, downgrading, it became evident that the cause of this (at least for my case) was the Windows Update utility.

Everything worked perfectly when I installed W7 / W8 / W 8.1 Preview from scratch but as soon as the Windows Update utility updated itself, it all went to **** and my drive was working like crazy.

I did stop the Windows Update service (wuauserv) and permanently stopped it (Inhabilitate) and everything is alright now and the disk usage is as it was before this glitch!

Answer 2

I found out that it is mainly "System" (in a process from 0,1Mb) that's accessing the HDD for nearly 100 to 100% :)

It's very anoying, I cannot disable it and WIndows stalls very often...

I've never had this problem untill i installed Windows 8 Pro (64bit)

Answer 3

I found out that it is mainly "System" (in a process from 0,1Mb) that's accessing the HDD for nearly 100 to 100% :)

It's very anoying, I cannot disable it and WIndows stalls very often...

I've never had this problem untill i installed Windows 8 Pro (64bit)

A quick google for "Windows 8 hdd 100%" and you find that this problem is like a rash.

1000's are suffering. The trouble is that there doesn't seem to be any one thing causing it.

I've had this problem and resolved it 3 times with completely different causes each time and today is came back arggh!!

Anyway if it might help you my first three experiences were solved using xperf to trace the problem through the IO stack. There is a great tutorial here

Using Xperf to investigate slow I/O issues - Ntdebugging Blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

My first 3 solutions (in chronological order) were

1. Remove the Intel storage driver and revert to Microsoft generic as there was a bug in the early release of x64
2. Revert to an earlier NVidia display driver as a bug caused Win x64 to continuously rebuild it's driver catalogue not only thrashing the HDD at 100% but also making space magically disappear (that bug has now been resolved and you should update to the latest version)
3. Remove AVG as their early version for Win 8 caused this to happen on a small number of systems (not sure why but apparently Avast had the same issue, again only early versions and only a small number of poeple)

I also found a LOT of posts about people with SSD's claiming that disabling write caching resolved this bug for them on the SSD (I did this and my SSD performance improved so there is something to it)

Finally, I saw one post about someone with a corrupt download folder for Windows Automatic update. Purging it and setting update to manual solved the problem for him. After installing updates he was able to go back to automatic so perhaps check your update history for any failed updates and if you have some follow those steps.

Good luck!

And if you find any other solutions please let me know because I'm going insane now that this has returned for me a fourth time!!

Answer 4

I'm having similar issues. Today alone I've had my hard drive making squeeks and high pitched noises. This computer is not 4 months old (ASUS Republic of Gamers AH-71). It happens when I'm on youtube and doing a few things at once, nothing which this laptop cannot handle. The computer will freeze up and just not allow anything to happen, task manager takes forever to pop up. It's ridiculous and I don't know why all I know is the noise is the hard drive and it shows that it's being used 100% at those times with 0 for the read and write speeds, so apparently it's not even being used...I'm confused by this and irritated and wanting to blame windows 8 although I have no proof. Anyone know what is causing this? I also am curious as my hard drive is a Hitachi, I really don't have much in that brand as far as hard drives as I've seen too many fail in the last few years. They seem to make inferior hard drives and I was thinking that perhaps I should just buy a Samsung SSD.

The reply below by gob0nkers is not helpful except that he/she pointed out that perhaps processes could be the cause. My computer was not performing anything else in the background that I know of as he/she described.

I'll probably end up getting a new hard drive.

Answer 5

I've have done this and every other thing imaginable. I've even reinstalled windows from scratch twice but this problem keeps showing up.

I'm considering dropping Windows 8 for good!