Excessive hard disk activity with Windows 7 (not indexing)

[Oberleutnant]

I've trying to solve this issue for months without much success.

Windows system processes are constantly using the hard drive so much that it's clearly affecting the performance. It doesn't matter if the computer is idle or running a program. I have tried disabling search indexing, scheduled disk defragmenter, antivirus software (AVG) and Windows page file, but nothing is helping.

You can clearly notice how all the activity gives choppy framerate when playing a game or a video. Also, I fear that it's slowly killing the hard drive, too.

It would seem that processes related to NTFS log files and whatever are the culprit, but I haven't found out anything about them in the web. Computer came installed with Intel Rapid Storage Technology. Does it have anything to do with the issue? Thanks for any help.

[General Zod]

Back up everything and get a new hard disk. Immediately. No version of Windows should be causing usage like that unless the drive is dying.

[Dominus Atheos]

Dear god we need a tech support subforum.

Open Resource Monitor, go to the disk tab, and that will tell you exactly how much disk I/O each process is using; then see what file that process is reading and/or writing so much.

If it is the log file, then that means some event is happening hundreds or thousands of times each second, in which case you should find out what even that is.

[Xon]

In the disk tab of performance monitor(start->performance monitor), expand the "Disk Activity" to see which files are being accessed. Try sorting by "Total B/s" to see which files are being heavily used as well as "Response Time" to determine which files are being hammered by disk bottlenecks.

[Edi]

You can do a quick SMARTS test to the HD using the Crystal Disk Info program. If it has any reallocated sectors (uudelleensijoitettuja sektoreita) or any sectors pending reallocation (uudelleensijoittamista odottavia sektoreita) or absolute worst case, unrecoverable sectors (korjauskelvottomia), it's time to back up your data like there's no tomorrow and then get a new hard disk. Because likely as not, in that case there literally may be no tomorrow for the disk that is breaking down.

If CDI shows everything in blue, there is no problem. Operating temperature may show yellow or even red but if everything else is blue, you're good. But if anything else shows anything other than blue, it's serious trouble.

My parents' hard drive was just a hair shy of breaking when I caught it because all it did was act a little slow and that could be chalked up to the age of the computer. When I caught it, it had 63(hex) reallocated sectors, three days later when I did the final backups it was 68. Threshold level is 4 or 5 after which problems begin to occur.

[Ryushikaze]

You can do a quick SMARTS test to the HD using the Crystal Disk Info program. If it has any reallocated sectors (uudelleensijoitettuja sektoreita) or any sectors pending reallocation (uudelleensijoittamista odottavia sektoreita) or absolute worst case, unrecoverable sectors (korjauskelvottomia), it's time to back up your data like there's no tomorrow and then get a new hard disk. Because likely as not, in that case there literally may be no tomorrow for the disk that is breaking down.

If CDI shows everything in blue, there is no problem. Operating temperature may show yellow or even red but if everything else is blue, you're good. But if anything else shows anything other than blue, it's serious trouble.

My parents' hard drive was just a hair shy of breaking when I caught it because all it did was act a little slow and that could be chalked up to the age of the computer. When I caught it, it had 63(hex) reallocated sectors, three days later when I did the final backups it was 68. Threshold level is 4 or 5 after which problems begin to occur.

Now that's a useful program. I've backed up my Boot drive after a serious crash a few days ago, but I might as well use this see how bad it's gotten and how long it has left.