Massive Ram Consumption After Internal HDD Installation

[bradp7575]

I recently installed a 1 TB WD caviar black HDD in my system to use as a data drive. After moving all of my movies, documents, pictures, and music, everything seemed to be working fine. However recently, I have been having a rather strange problem.

Whenever I go to access the files on this new hdd, the ram consumption goes from around 1gb to maxing out my system's 4gb total. I ran a virus sweep and some diagnostic tools for the hdd, but nothing has come up as abnormal. Has anyone ever seen this before?

 

[sminlal]

I suspect that what you're seeing is RAM caching. This is more or less visible on Task Manager depending on which version of Windows you're using. When you read a file, a copy is cached in RAM so that any subsequent access can use the data immediately without having to read it from the disk again.

 

[bradp7575]

Is there a way to stop this? It kind of kills my performance. I'm using Windows 7 Pro, btw. The only way I can seem to fix this is by restarting the explorer process, but I still can't access my files.

 

[Hawkeye22]

It sounds more like an OS issue or a hardware issue. Is indexing turned on for the entire drive? If so, try disabling indexing on that drive. You may also want to get HDTune and check your drive's SMART status.

 

[sminlal]

Windows releases the memory used to cache disk files if another program needs it, so I'm a little mystified as to why this would be having a performance impact on you. What program(s) are you running that perform poorly?

 

[bradp7575]

It's any program that is currently running that is running poorly. There isn't enough RAM to go around. I turned off indexing, but it didn't help.

 

[sminlal]

When you run the Resource Monitor (Start -> type "Resource Monitor" into the search box, press <ENTER>) and select the "Memory" tab, during the time that you're experiencing poor performance what process has the highest Working Set and what process has the highest Hard Faults?

 

[bradp7575]

No one program stood out. They all seemed to actually go up a bit, but no process shot to the top of the list. It also seemed as if something else that I can't see is sucking up the memory. I'm not sure what would cause this after merely clicking on a folder.

The complete freeze out only seems to occur when I try to go into my videos folder which contains the bulk of what's on the drive. I do get a slight memory hit when I go into my music, but it isn't enough to completely take all of the memory.

 

[Hawkeye22]

You might try turning off thumbnails if there are a lot of videos or pictures in that folder.

 

[bradp7575]

Best answer selected by bradp7575.

 

[bradp7575]

You might try turning off thumbnails if there are a lot of videos or pictures in that folder.

I don't know why that worked, but it did. Thanks!