Windows 8 Pro 100% Disk Usage on Startup

I had Windows 7 on this laptop before. This didn't happen. It just goes all the way up to 100% and everythings slow when the real usage is only like 0,8MB/S-1MB/S

What could be wrong? I already did both disk checks although the second one took a while because it got stuck on 28% but it finished later. There is a firmware update on the acer website saying "Will increase hard drive performance" yet I'm scared of bricking my hard drive.

What should I do? Oh and by the way I defrag very frequently and it does this even on clean boot. It only does this on startup, but it's really annoying.

It's a Western Digital Scorpio Blue WD7500BPVT

Tomi

Posted 2013-03-27T21:11:17.630

Reputation: 11

how much RAM do you have? – Keltari – 2013-03-27T21:12:06.780

i have 6GB ram why? – Tomi – 2013-03-27T21:22:08.240

Install that update. It's really hard (if even possible) to damage a hard drive programmatically. – gronostaj – 2013-03-27T21:23:21.540

are you 100% sure about that – Tomi – 2013-03-27T21:23:56.857

Defragging very often is a bad practice and not necessary. Defrag on modern hardware needs to be done rarely, unless you are turning a TON of data or your hard drive is full. – Austin T French – 2013-03-27T21:33:49.697

Okay maybe not that frequently then. Is 2 times a month a lot.. – Tomi – 2013-03-27T21:35:02.670

With Windows 7 or 8, more than never is a lot ;-) It does that automatically in the background when idle. – André Stannek – 2013-03-27T22:09:07.893

Aha , okay! :-) – Tomi – 2013-03-27T22:49:53.220

Answers

When this happens at startup you see Superfetch in action. Superfetch tries to load all important and often accessed data to speed up later start of tools. To verify this, open ResourceMonitor, go to the disk tab and look which process causes the disk IO:

enter image description here

remember the PID, start ProcessExplroer and put he mouse pointer over the svchost.exe with the PID you remebered from the DISK tab. Now look if Superfetch (SYSMAIN) is shown in the tooltip.

magicandre1981

Posted 2013-03-27T21:11:17.630

Reputation: 86 560

If only resource monitor opened :( It all freezes on startup and i can't do anything – Tomi – 2013-03-28T11:24:04.920

And that's actually true, but why does it freeze my WHOLE system. Shouldn't it be a background process that doesn't affect the performance? – Tomi – 2013-03-28T11:24:59.330

ok, as a workaround stop the service with services.msc. Now make sure you run the HDD in AHCI mode. Also install the latest AHCI drivers. Also run a HDD diag tool from Western Digital to see if the HDD is fine or has issues. – magicandre1981 – 2013-03-28T20:06:54.200

The problem is there is no process with such high usage in the resource monitor so i have no idea which one is it – Tomi – 2013-03-30T11:41:28.590

I think it runs in AHCI mode, but ill double check – Tomi – 2013-03-30T11:41:44.797

Yup it does. Another thing i noticed that the average response time for the hard drive is 10000ms+ on startup :( – Tomi – 2013-03-30T11:52:40.607

I am really tempted to install the hard drive firmware update – Tomi – 2013-03-30T11:58:18.240

if the response time is so high, the Hard drive dies very soon. Backup all data and buy a new HDD/SSD. – magicandre1981 – 2013-03-30T20:18:23.440

noo it only does it when the usage is on 100% otherwise it has normal response time – Tomi – 2013-04-02T10:21:14.020

Did you install Hyper-V? I haven't extensively dug into the reason why but I had it enabled on a test machine - the excessive disk usage seemed to stop after Hyper-V was uninstalled.

LawrenceC

Posted 2013-03-27T21:11:17.630

Reputation: 63 487

I didn't i only did a standard upgrade to Windows 8 Pro, but i think it is enabled because i was trying a vm earlier... Hmm let me take a look – Tomi – 2013-03-27T22:44:02.647

Nope its not enabled in the Windows Features – Tomi – 2013-03-27T22:45:37.327