Windows 7 hard drive constantly reading 25+ MB/s

I am running windows 7 64x amd architecture, 4GB ram, 1TB hard drive at i think 7100 RPM.

this problem has bothered me before, the hard drive would never stop reading/writing data. i pinpointed it to the system process and from there did some research (services run under the system process apparently,) and tried the solutions i found. most of them referred to the indexing or the superfetch stuff but i know that doesn't apply to me because i have them disabled.

from watching the resource monitor i have found that the I/O of the drive often lies in the 20-40 MB/s range (WTF this is a HUGE number for both idling and working I/O!!½!).

before i could restart my computer to fix the issue but now when i try that it just becomes worse. i have restarted my pc 4 times today and the disk i/o is only increasing or at best stays the same...

even when I'm working on the computer like I'm doing now it's still super slow, but once a program is running and don't require a lot of IO e.g. Chrome i can actually do some decent stuff on it.

please help me i can't do anything on my pc when its behaving like this.

^{Click to enlarge}

Edit: apparently its some kind of temporary file that's being temporarily written to all the time and another suggestions said that i had run out of RAM and the system was using the disk as some backup memory or something, that's not true though. i have a whole 1GB free in my ram (that's at least what task manager tells me)

^{Click to enlarge}

any ideas? i have no clue whatsoever this can be...

(i also noticed a strange patern in the ram usage over time, it seems to clear up some ram only to load the stuff back into memory again or something.

user3118949

Posted 2014-01-16T23:38:57.357

Reputation: 1

what happens in safe mode? have you ran a spyware/virus scan? – Hefewe1zen – 2014-01-17T00:45:05.333

You need to expand the column titled file to be sure. My guess your try to have a bunch of programs open and you are use a bunch of swap file because you have run out real memory. – cybernard – 2014-01-17T01:26:30.247

Try Error checking the drive ie, right click on the drive->properties->Tools tab. The drive might be developing hard to read/write sectors occupied by system files. – miggy – 2014-01-17T02:59:53.940

click the checkbox of SYSTEM and look which files it does access. – magicandre1981 – 2014-01-17T06:00:10.287

im going to try all of the above and see what happens, thanks for all the suggestions so far. – user3118949 – 2014-01-17T20:13:28.440

Answers

Please check if you have some BitTorrent Client or a server running, if so it might be using up resources in read/write cycles, but then it may also be that you have some virus, adware or spywares running on your system a good utility to check this is available here: http://www.malwarebytes.org/, try removing all toolbars and unwanted apps. Then you might also want to have a check on the SMART status of your HD. It is possible your system is trying to remap damaged sectors.

Gaurav Joseph

Posted 2014-01-16T23:38:57.357

Reputation: 1 503

@user3118949, A little late but just a note, after i found 2 red Xs on my HDDscan, the disk started to gave me BSODs for ntfs.sys. After a while, it was dead. Replace the disk or do a cloning while you still can is a must. – None – 2015-12-29T15:22:38.573

i scanned my computer less than a week ago and come on, i have about 600GB of files that i must scan in a full scan, however. i did download and install Crystal disk info and dumped the data out of that into here. the smart status says its ok but i see that the read error and the reallocated sectors count are both at 200 while the threshold is much lower, does that mean that my computers hdd is dying? :s

– user3118949 – 2014-01-17T20:59:56.013

Based on a web search, it sounds like the temp file might be created by Windows Defender:

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windows/en-US/1d79bbb8-c77b-47dc-b3c1-63532436ea3e/cwindowstemptmp-what-is-it?forum=w7itprosecurity

http://bytes.com/topic/net/answers/722242-windows-defender

You could try disabling Windows Defender to see if that helps. Also, if you're running some other malware scanning software already, you probably shouldn't be running Windows Defender as well, as that can cause conflicts.

jjlin

Posted 2014-01-16T23:38:57.357

Reputation: 12 964

great answer but the thing is that is have all my antivirus disabled at the moment. but the thing is that the problem cleared itself out after a few days of the computer constantly being on. and the problem reappears if i restart the pc. (like i accidentally did today >.>) – user3118949 – 2014-01-28T21:22:18.287