What can I do about 99% disk usage (only 0.9 MB/s)?

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My new laptop is two months old, the first day I got this laptop I noticed this but I assumed it was a bug in Windows 8. However I still have this issue today after reformatting and installing all updates.

The problem is that the disk shows 99% usage from an application...

In this case Dropbox, but the usage is never over 2 MB/s; in this case it is 0.8 MB/s.

What can I do about this?

Ryuk

Posted 2013-02-06T00:36:05.067

Reputation: 71

Question was closed 2018-06-25T09:27:42.003

It's common problem in Windows 8. Try disabling SuperFetch - press Win+R, type services.msc, hit Enter, find there SuperFetch service, double-click on it and change start mode to Disabled, restart computer. And tell us the results. – Jet – 2014-07-04T15:37:26.020

How big is the disk and how much free space do you have on it? Are you having actual performance problems or is the issue merely cosmetic? – David Schwartz – 2013-02-06T00:42:03.253

1You're just under the users tab which shows the applications that you have running. What about the system? You may have indexing enabled which is causing the initial large amounts of disk reads/writes. – kobaltz – 2013-02-06T00:46:45.600

1TB and I am using under 100GB. The PC does feel slower than my old one... and yet the specs are much better. – Ryuk – 2013-02-06T00:47:00.100

1The combination of very high disk % usage and low speeds is usually quite rare, except when you are doing a lot of random IO (and download email really is not that kind of IO, no idea about dropbox though) or if there are lots of retrys/errors. If those are occuring then you should be able to see them, either in the event log or in increasing S.M.A.R.T values on the drive. – Hennes – 2013-02-06T00:52:59.293

Does anyone know if the % in that app is calculated as % of total throughput usage vs % of total throughput capacity? And if % of total capacity, how would they estimate total capacity? – Daniel R Hicks – 2013-02-06T01:00:05.347

1I was told that the percentage you see under "Disk" is the percentage of time the disk I/O queue is not empty. – David Schwartz – 2013-02-06T06:40:42.993

This is a windows 8 problem. If anyone knows the solution please let me know. I've tried adjusting paging files and write caches, but no luck – Funkodebat – 2013-11-10T19:39:28.953

Answers

4

I've seen a similar behavior on some computers at work. You have a pretty good chance to be infected with a trojan malware. I'll suggest to run malware and virus scans on your PC.

Juan Carlos

Posted 2013-02-06T00:36:05.067

Reputation: 138

2

I had the same issue. It got resolved after updating Intel® Chipset Device Software. Download this from Intel website for your chipset and install to see if it resolves the issue.

This link will help get the right drivers http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/detect.html

Guest

Posted 2013-02-06T00:36:05.067

Reputation: 21

It would be a great idea if you provided a link to the software download. – bwDraco – 2015-10-01T23:27:47.163

This worked for me and also reduced some very repetitive error messages in the system event logs. For me this raises the general question: What does Microsoft Updates take care of and what kind of updates to I have to patiently figure out myself like this one? Or would it be ASUS responsibility in my case to add an updater for the chipset software? My system started to become almost unusable before this update. And now that I have fixed it I still have no clue what was wrong and how it got wrong in the first place. – Patrick Fromberg – 2016-04-23T22:55:02.740