Windows 8 using 100% of HDD with high average response times and low read/write speed

Anonymous
2013-04-29T02:11:24+00:00

Hi There,

Since I upgraded to Windows 8 (in January), I have intermittently experienced freezes, and general performance dips. Upon investigating I found that when this occurred, my Hard Drive was showing as 100% Active Time, with a low Read and Write Speed (could be as low as 10 KB/s or as high as 40MB/s) and an Average Response time well into the 1000's (ms).

This is an example https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/23428568/100%25%20HDD.png.

The same thing happens on all the Hard Drives when they're in use. Since it originally started happening, it has only become worse and more frequent. I had thought it may have been a heat problem, but it never gets above 40-50c on the HDD.

All in all.. i'm very confused and really looking for any help you can provide because it's really affecting my daily usage...

Computer Model - Alienware M15X Laptop

OS - Windows 8 Pro 64Bit

Thanks in advance :)

Oliver

Windows for home | Previous Windows versions | Performance and system failures

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  1. Anonymous
    2013-08-27T16:55:54+00:00

    If you have multiple hard drives you can move the Page File to the secondary hard drive and that should alleviate some pain when the C: drive is really being used.

    It's possible that if you have an Anti Virus installed that it's doing too many checks against the whole hard drive, causing it to constantly be active.

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  2. Anonymous
    2013-08-27T17:42:00+00:00

    I had the same issue and running the Dism /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth and sfc /scannow commands really helped.  In fact, I've used it a couple times since it seems Windows 8 gets corrupted easily.

    See more details at:  http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh824869.aspx

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  3. Anonymous
    2013-08-29T04:53:39+00:00

    It is incredible that Microsoft hasn't been able to fix this. Today, after 3 days of formatting, partitioning, uninstalling, installing, updating, upgrading, downgrading, it became evident that the cause of this (at least for my case) was the Windows Update utility.

    Everything worked perfectly when I installed W7 / W8 / W 8.1 Preview from scratch but as soon as the Windows Update utility updated itself, it all went to **** and my drive was working like crazy.

    I did stop the Windows Update service (wuauserv) and permanently stopped it (Inhabilitate) and everything is alright now and the disk usage is as it was before this glitch!

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    60+ people found this answer helpful.
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  4. Anonymous
    2013-08-29T13:36:03+00:00

    Javier:

    You're right. 

    I've had a whole bunch of problems related to Windows Update on two different computers.  Disk Cleanup and 'Configuring Updates' hangs, high disk use by tiworker.exe, etc.  If it happens again I'll try your solution.

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