How to prevent 100% of disk usage in Windows 8

[ksio89]

Not actually a question, but instead a guide to solve a common issue in Windows 8 where the "System" process uses 100% of disk constantly, usually leading to slowdowns and hanging, also probably reducing the lifespan of your HDD. You can verify when it happens by checking task manager or perfomance monitor.

Last month, I've created a topic asking for a solution, however as I couldn't find none, I've reverted from Win 8 to Win 7. I've recently purchased a laptop with a Win 8 OEM copy pre-installed, and the issue showed its ugly head again. The HDD in the new laptop spins at 7200 RPM and has 16 MB of buffer, compared to 5400 RPM and 8 MB of buffer in the older laptop, so it doesn't mind whether it's a low-end HDD or not, it's an OS issue. Fortunately, I've found a solution.

It's simple: just disable paging file (virtual memory) in the partiton where Windows is installed. I tried raising/lowering the amount of virtual memory, but it didn't change anything, only switching it off solved the problem. In disk usage monitoring tab, under "System" process (PID=4), I've noticed that there was a large amount of reads and writes (several MB/s) on "pagefile.sys" ( which is the paging file itself), leading to 100% of disk usage. After disabling virtual memory and rebooting the OS, the issue is solved permanently. The disk usage now stays around 1-5% most of the time when idle, and no more slowdows or hangs. I'm sure my HDD is happier now.

The new laptop has 6 GB of RAM , and I kill unnecessary processes and services, thus I'm sure there's no need for virtual memory, even in the older one which has 4 GB. I've read somewhere that a bunch of Windows 8 process and services needs paging file feature enabled, even if you have plenty of RAM, but so far it doesn't seem to be true. Just disable virtual memory and reboot, bet it will solve this issue.

 

[DineshZaladekar]

you dont have to worry ksio89
you can limit the disk usage by some simple method there are many complex ones

open my computer right click on c drive / any drive you want to set usage amount
click on properties ... click on quota .. click on show quota settings
a new small window will open ...... in that window check in enable quota settings
and also ckeck in deny disk space to users exceeding quota limit

then click on limit disk space to then type the value/amount in GB you want to limit disk usage and also set a warning level ..
it gives you warning when the level has beet touch or crossed


then click on apply

thats it your disk usage level has been set
BEST OF LUCK

REGARDS

DINESH ZALADEKAR

 

[DineshZaladekar]

you dont have to worry ksio89
you can limit the disk usage by some simple method there are many complex ones

open my computer right click on c drive / any drive you want to set usage amount
click on properties ... click on quota .. click on show quota settings
a new small window will open ...... in that window check (mark in) in enable quota settings
and also ckeck in deny disk space to users exceeding quota limit

then click on limit disk space to then type the value/amount in GB you want to limit disk usage and also set a warning level ..
it gives you warning when the level has beet touch or crossed


then click on apply

thats it your disk usage level has been set
BEST OF LUCK

REGARDS

DINESH ZALADEKAR

 

[genz]

For the sake of those googling this, ignore Dinesh. He's talking about ways to stop your drive being 100% full whereas your problem stems from the fact that the drive is using all its speed at reading that data to serve the background system, making everything else on your computer run slowly.

 

[supp]

Hi ,
Now I am going to give the solution for this very common and yet frustrating problem.
but first i want to tell you why this happens. This problem happens only in windows 8 and 8.1. to make it faster, it uses a service called as superfetch, what it does is every now and then it optimizes you hard disk and keeps a detailed record of all the files you have in your harddisk(study about paging, frames, defragmentation, fragmentation if you want in depth details), thats why when you search anything your results are quicker when compared to other windows.This optimization results in 100% disk usage.

To solve this you need to perform following tasks.
1. increase your virtual memory(or page memory) to atleast 4gb , just google it.
2. disable automatic defragmentation
3. press windows+s search for "services", or control panel->view local services
3.1. look for "superfetch", right click properties, startup type make it disable, then go for recovery tab and make all "take no action"
3.2. Do the above same step for "windows search" instead of "superfetch"

By doing so this problem should end(atleast I think it will).

 

[johnbl]

windows 8.x system process does a lot of data integrity checks in the background, it does this to repair and prevent certain types of issues that occur on your drive, these can take some time to complete and should be done as a idle time background process. I have looked at several system that were stuck at !00% disk use, each one had problems in the drive subsystems.
- drive disconnection and reconnecting over and over
- bad outdated firmware on SSD drive (drive was taking too long to complete its TRIM functions/garbage collection and windows resets the sata port after 30 seconds)
- Bad SATA port software drivers
- bad SATA port connection, wrong firmware setting in BIOS
- errors in disk cache in the electronics of the drive (often can be fixed by turning off lazy writes on the disk)
- corrupted files in the OS (run sfc.exe /scannow of detect isssue and repair)

In most systems if you see 100% disk usage you have a problem and it is not your pagefile that is causing it.
it can be caused by where the pagefile is located on the disk though., in those cases you disable the pagefile, reboot,
delete the pagefile, let the OS clean up the space then make a new page file and reboot. it is a lot faster to clean up a file system and
do data integrity checks on a lot fewer files.

overall better to fix the root cause of the issue than disabling the subsystem that are effected.

 

[Ovi Ovi]

I solved the same problem by disabling Superfetch from services.

 

[gservetas]

disabling superfetch fixed it for me too

 

[johnbl]

It is often better just to look and see what the system is trying to prefetch for you and determine why it is taking so long. You can use the microsoft tool Rammap64.exe, select the file detail tab and see what is trying to prefetch. You may find that it is trying to prefetch some program like steam but steam is downloading your game library to your machine and will not be done for hours or days.

if the prefetch program is hung on a particular file, it would be better to know why that file is a problem than just turning off the prefetch for your entire system. The failure of prefetch to complete is a good early sign of a problems, data corruption, firmware issues in SSD, bad head/sector alignment issues in HDD. errors in drivers for storage controllers. Turning of the prefetch is like trying to cross a road with lots of traffic and just closing your eyes before you cross to make the traffic go away. You can do it but it but it might not be the best idea.

disabling superfetch fixed it for me too

 

[IEATXP]

It is often better just to look and see what the system is trying to prefetch for you and determine why it is taking so long. You can use the microsoft tool Rammap64.exe, select the file detail tab and see what is trying to prefetch. You may find that it is trying to prefetch some program like steam but steam is downloading your game library to your machine and will not be done for hours or days.

if the prefetch program is hung on a particular file, it would be better to know why that file is a problem than just turning off the prefetch for your entire system. The failure of prefetch to complete is a good early sign of a problems, data corruption, firmware issues in SSD, bad head/sector alignment issues in HDD. errors in drivers for storage controllers. Turning of the prefetch is like trying to cross a road with lots of traffic and just closing your eyes before you cross to make the traffic go away. You can do it but it but it might not be the best idea.

disabling superfetch fixed it for me too

johnbl do you think you could write a quick learners guide for me to follow on how to fix this problem? I Just purchased a brand new lenovo laptop running windows 8 that has this same %99 running problem

 

[johnbl]

-Windows 8.x will do a lot of checks on a new drive, OEM don't properly format a drive these days, they just drop a image of the operating system on it. Windows 8.x will attempt to read and locate sectors on the drive, when it finds sectors that can be read but have read errors, it will attempt to read the data over and over to get a good copy and then relocate the data to another location on the disk. This process takes time and is started 5 mins after the system goes idle. For most people, use control panel power settings to high performances and just leave the machine on for a day or so it should just work itself out and the "problem" will go away.

-There are other things that can cause the same 100% disk use for example the system tries to guess what you want to do and will load programs into memory before you actually attempt to run them. Some files that are selected may not actually be currently loaded on your disk, they may be in the process of being downloaded or streamed. For example, you might have a game service that stores your games for you and lets you play a game while it downloads the rest of your games or parts of games in the background. If windows tries to prefetch these files into memory it will end up spinning waiting on the disk to provide the file, the disk is waiting on the network to provide the file, but the game service is loading the file very slowly in the background so it does not tie up your network bandwidth or CPU.

-there are also bugs with corrupted file systems that are pretty easy to fix with a chkdsk /f /r

- there some malware that now hide in the file system file streams
I would think that some virus scanners and malwarebytes should find these and remove them.

- I have seen issues where a the search index searches your hard drive and builds a database index
but the drive is corrupted and the search ends up having a loop so it never gets to the end of the file search,
it just keeps building a bigger and bigger index until all of your hard drive space is used up.
(just run chkdsk /f /r and delete the search index to fix)

- for most people, the problem just goes away after a few day, except on laptops that go to sleep fast.
it might take 8 hours of real time to scan and fix a disk with errors, more for a large disk. On a laptop
that goes to sleep in 15 mins after idle the OS will have only 10min to work on the task on each wake cycle.

if you really want to see what your system is doing you should get a copy of the tool rammap64.exe this is a tool written by a company called sysinternals. Microsoft bought the company and has the tools for free on its website http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb842062

You can download the file and see all the files that are open on your system. you will be surprised what is getting preloaded into memory for you. I am looking at my list now and I see programs I have not run for almost a year and they are being preloaded. The system cache manager just fills the unused ram with what it thinks I might want to run. if one of these files were located on a disk with disk errors, it would take a lot of time to load the file into memory as the system attempts to read the disk over and over each time I boot.
even if I never requested the file to be run, the disk might queued up and running full speed because of this process. it is not really a bug in the cache manager that the disk has errors and causes the disk to spin at 100%, it is disk problem that has not crashed your system yet.

There can also be other problems that will slow a disk. Errors in the electronics, bugs in the chipset drivers, even a bad cable connection. thermal expansion/contraction on a cable connection can make and break a connection several times a second causing a drive to disconnect and auto reconnect several times a second. This really can cause your drive to slow down but it still works until the drive gets disconnected for 30 seconds then you get a logged error.

The same thermal contraction can cause circuits to fail. (brittle solder joints crack and lift off the circuit board)

I have looked into 100% disk usage on solid state drives and they have all been firmware related.
The operation of solid state drives really depends on having proper time to run their clean up routines. They really suffer on laptops that try to save their power. The drives have to run their garbage collection routines and their TRIM functions. When these get blocked because firmware bugs or lack of idle time while the machine is on the drive kind of gets wedged up to the point it can not function correctly. Often you just need to power on the machine and boot into BIOS and leave the machine alone overnight. The SSD will start its firmware internal garbage collection and can move bad blocks around and do its various repairs.
SSD have very limited ability to write to the drive. Figure 2000 writes to a block and that block is dead. It really does not take long to do that amount of writes. Just look at the amount of temp files being written by a browser like chrome to get a idea.

anyway, maybe what I said will give you a idea what the problem is.

It is often better just to look and see what the system is trying to prefetch for you and determine why it is taking so long. You can use the microsoft tool Rammap64.exe, select the file detail tab and see what is trying to prefetch. You may find that it is trying to prefetch some program like steam but steam is downloading your game library to your machine and will not be done for hours or days.

if the prefetch program is hung on a particular file, it would be better to know why that file is a problem than just turning off the prefetch for your entire system. The failure of prefetch to complete is a good early sign of a problems, data corruption, firmware issues in SSD, bad head/sector alignment issues in HDD. errors in drivers for storage controllers. Turning of the prefetch is like trying to cross a road with lots of traffic and just closing your eyes before you cross to make the traffic go away. You can do it but it but it might not be the best idea.

disabling superfetch fixed it for me too

johnbl do you think you could write a quick learners guide for me to follow on how to fix this problem? I Just purchased a brand new lenovo laptop running windows 8 that has this same %99 running problem

 

[numair94]

Hi,

I have been searching for a solution for over a month now and have finally solved the issue:

Go to charms bar and press search, then type view local services.
Once here, stop and disable BITS (Background Intelligent Transfer Service). Also, set windows update checks to manual.
Chrome also seemed to be a factor so uninstall that too.

I hope this helps you out

 

[ksio89]

Yeah, disabling Superfetch is a simple and effective trick to solve this issue.

 

[Jayday69]

It is often better just to look and see what the system is trying to prefetch for you and determine why it is taking so long. You can use the microsoft tool Rammap64.exe, select the file detail tab and see what is trying to prefetch. You may find that it is trying to prefetch some program like steam but steam is downloading your game library to your machine and will not be done for hours or days.

if the prefetch program is hung on a particular file, it would be better to know why that file is a problem than just turning off the prefetch for your entire system. The failure of prefetch to complete is a good early sign of a problems, data corruption, firmware issues in SSD, bad head/sector alignment issues in HDD. errors in drivers for storage controllers. Turning of the prefetch is like trying to cross a road with lots of traffic and just closing your eyes before you cross to make the traffic go away. You can do it but it but it might not be the best idea.

disabling superfetch fixed it for me too

Hi John

After months of hanging and considering swapping the laptop, some investigating found the problem and disabling superfetch and page filing has solved the problem for me.

I am curious about this programme you mention though and have downloaded it. What am I looking for with RamMap to discover the problem?

Jason

 

[istariknight]

It seems to me that johnbl provided a very detailed explanation of what to look for on our Windows 8.x systems, and people's replies thus far since then tell me that they have not read it. If you want to turn off superfetch altogether that's your prerogative, but you'll never know the root of the problem unless you dive in with Rammap with superfetch enabled. At least that was my understanding.

For myself, I went to the File Summary tab and sorted the entries by Standby memory size. I found many programs listed in standby that I haven't used in years, quite like johnbl's experience. I emptied my standby list by using Empty>>Empty Standby List and I successfully freed over 3GB of RAM.

As for disk usage, I noticed my AV software (BitDefender) immediately snatched up memory again, and before I had emptied my standby list it was my biggest offender. Furthermore, it consistently rates the highest on my real time disk usage list. I believe I found my problem.

As an aside, if anyone has suggestions as to how best to limit or tweak my resource management policies manually, I'd really appreciate it! I'll likely run chkdisk later tonight as well.

 

[TRCIII]

Didn't work...even after reboot with paging turned off, it ran right back up to 100% in no time. Then I tried just moving paging to my D: drive (a separate physical drive in the device)--which caused both of them to regularly max out. (The D: drive, much less frequently than the C: drive, and never for as long.)

The only thing that made the problem less severe (after trying this on several different machines) was that the problem seemed to be not as bad on my laptop...and the reason quickly became apparent: my laptop had a solid state drive, so it was just working faster than my other drives. So, the NUMBER of times I got "(Not Responding)" didn't lessen, but the length of time the applications remained unresponsive was less on the solid state.

Not actually a question, but instead a guide to solve a common issue in Windows 8 where the "System" process uses 100% of disk constantly, usually leading to slowdowns and hanging, also probably reducing the lifespan of your HDD. You can verify when it happens by checking task manager or perfomance monitor.

Last month, I've created a topic asking for a solution, however as I couldn't find none, I've reverted from Win 8 to Win 7. I've recently purchased a laptop with a Win 8 OEM copy pre-installed, and the issue showed its ugly head again. The HDD in the new laptop spins at 7200 RPM and has 16 MB of buffer, compared to 5400 RPM and 8 MB of buffer in the older laptop, so it doesn't mind whether it's a low-end HDD or not, it's an OS issue. Fortunately, I've found a solution.

It's simple: just disable paging file (virtual memory) in the partiton where Windows is installed. I tried raising/lowering the amount of virtual memory, but it didn't change anything, only switching it off solved the problem. In disk usage monitoring tab, under "System" process (PID=4), I've noticed that there was a large amount of reads and writes (several MB/s) on "pagefile.sys" ( which is the paging file itself), leading to 100% of disk usage. After disabling virtual memory and rebooting the OS, the issue is solved permanently. The disk usage now stays around 1-5% most of the time when idle, and no more slowdows or hangs. I'm sure my HDD is happier now.

The new laptop has 6 GB of RAM , and I kill unnecessary processes and services, thus I'm sure there's no need for virtual memory, even in the older one which has 4 GB. I've read somewhere that a bunch of Windows 8 process and services needs paging file feature enabled, even if you have plenty of RAM, but so far it doesn't seem to be true. Just disable virtual memory and reboot, bet it will solve this issue.