Fixing 100% disk usage in Windows 10 with Chrome and Skype running

Hi,

I've just solved this problem on my Dell Optiplex 990, running Windows 10.

It was running in RAID mode (as set in the BIOS) using iaStorAV.sys, and after an update from a hard drive to an SSD it was using often crashing with 100% of disk usage, but with no real activity (0 MB/s).

Having tried so many of the proposed solutions on the 'net (Virtual memory, disabling an interrupt, Windows Defender disable, Skype/Chrome mis-match), I finally went for changing the BIOS mode from RAID to AHCI.  This forced a change of the driver to iaStor.sys instead of iaStorAV.sys and all the problems have gone.

So it does seem as though iaStorAV.sys has a problem, at least in Windows 10 with an SSD.

Note that in order to change from RAID to AHCI in the BIOS requires doing it whilst 'in' Safe Mode - as detailed here:

http://www.tenforums.com/drivers-hardware/15006-attn-ssd-owners-enabling-ahci-mode-after-windows-10-installation.html

I hope this helps to solve someone else's problem - if only to point in the right direction (bad driver!).

Richard

I have this problem since a few days... There is not already an official patch? The proposed solution does not convince me because I have a Chrome extension that control the parameter "Prefetch resources to load pages more quickly".

My Chrome settings :

The puzzle piece means that I can't control this parameter because there is an extension that control it.

So I uninstall Skype until this problem is not resolved.

Edit:

Damn, now it's Skype for Business (included in Office 2013) who does the same thing... And I can't uninstall it without uninstall all the Office suite. Why the world is so hard? :(

John, 

*  I hope that people understand that if you run Windows 10 with 2-4 GB of RAM that you need to use the 32 Bit version of Windows 10, and if more RAM you need to use the 64 Bit version of Windows 10.  People may forget those facts. I have 8 GB RAM & Windows 10/64 Bit. 

*  After 10 minutes my resources are so low that it would seem like I am bragging if I show you them here.  Windows Defender does not seem to use too much of my resources.  Norton is a great antivirus program, though it does use resources.

Some of the suggestions here are not wise.

1. If you disable the pagefile, you open your system up for becoming even slower or potentially crashing. The pagefile is used to temporarily store programs or their data loaded in memory which are not being currently accessed and room is needed to load additional programs or data. When this happens, these dormant programs or its data are swapped to disk which allows other programs to load. If this happens often, you will notice a slowdown of your system. Many systems today come with 4GB of memory which could limit you if you are using a lot of programs at the same time. The only cure for this is installing more memory.
2. Disabling your antivirus is also not a good idea. If you have a truly intrusive antivirus such as Norton or McAfee, uninstall it and get one which uses less system resources. I have not heard much of Windows Defender causing slowdown issues. That is usually a very low resource antivirus. Check to see if it is doing a virus scan when you notice high disk usage problems.
3. To help track down what process might be causing the problem do this:

  a. Download and run Process Explorer from Windows Sysinternals.

  b. Once you start it, enable showing Process I/O data. [Go to "View" > "Select Columns" and under the "Process I/O" tab select "Reads" and "Writes". This will show you what processes are doing a lot of disk I/O.

    (1) If it is a particular program, then you have it.

    (2) If it is "System", then it is most likely a driver or some Windows maintenance process. It might be a little difficult to determine but possibly you might be able to tell by what file or files are most active.

      (a) Open "Task Manager", select "Performance" tab, and click the "Open  Resource Monitor" link at the bottom.

      (b) Open the "Disk" section, see what file(s) are being accessed the most and see if it can be related back to a particular program or standard Windows process.

    (3) If it is "svchost.exe", Hold your mouse over that svchost process and it will list what is running under it. There may be several processes running there, possibly you could narrow it down to one.

JohnD

hey 

maybe windows defender is good but whats the point of it when its just give hangs n loading , read ,write problems in hdd , also its delete the file it think as a virus , I m using quick heal as my antivirus prog but its also cause prob in disk usage so i just disabled its virus protection permanently this will fix the disk usage but no longer auto scan for virus, needed to manually scan hdd n flash drives .