Hard drive often running constantly

[kev26a]

Hi, since installing windows 10, initially fine now recently my hard drive runs constantly even when idle, it slows everything down and is becoming a real pain especially going online! When it is doing this there seems no obvious reason, i.e. it is not downloading updates, running defrag or disc check. Maybe I'm missing something obvious, but I'm not a tech head so do not want to do anything drastic to solve this; anyone any ideas on this please let me know

 

[Trouble]

My normal suggestion is always the same.
Give it time, let your computer run, (especially idle as that is when windows does a lot of background tasks), people are frequently rebooting and Windows never get's a chance to catch up.

Go here
Control Panel\All Control Panel Items\Administrative Tools\Resource Monitor
Select the Disk tab from along the top.
Take a look at the information and see if you can get a sense of what is hitting your disk with all the read / writes.

 

[Saabman11]

Tried this and the Hard Drive is running at 100% all the time. Any other suggestions? Thanks.

 

[kev26a]

I'm still in the same position myself, I don't reboot, but I find this happening incredibly frustrating it doesn't matter how long the PC is on idle i.e. even an hour later the only way I can get the Hard Drive to stop running it's self into the ground is to end task on at least one of the background services running. From what I've read elsewhere when it comes to windows 10 Microsoft are about as helpful as a chocolate teapot

 

[Trouble]

The only thing I can think of doing would be to clean boot your system
Disable all Start Up Items as well as all non-Microsoft services as per the instructions here.....
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/929135

If it still does it then I'd be installing more RAM or inspecting the drive itself

 

[keith l terrill]

I have the same problems. I have to run Windows on one of my systems. But, for the rest of my systems I solved this problem: I installed Linux Mint 17. On this one, where we have to use a few programs that only run in Windows, I will be dual installing Linux and we will only run Windows when we have to.... other wise we just kissed Microsoft Good-Bye!

 

[THUA]

Has anyone figured out the root cause to this issue yet? Please share solution. Thank you

 

[Snooze77777]

My experience has been that when a hard drive runs too much for seemingly no reason, it is because S.M.A.R.T. drive firmware is busy relocating bad sectors to prevent data loss. Scanning the drive may show no errors. Running the quick test of the manufacturer's testing software may well not detect errors either (SMART is good at masking failing drives) but if you run the long test it will probably show the drive as failing. Acronis Drive Monitor software (free) will also show any problems. Before SMART, drives would just die if a lot of sectors went bad or the system would just hang - SMART is a great improvement but it can make one impervious to a soon to fail drive.
Windows 10 and Linux Mint are both excellent operating systems but have different file structures and when you install Linux it will most likely reformat your drive and any sector problems may disappear at least for a while. If the problem was not related to actual hardware fatigue the same could be accomplished by reformatting and then restoring or reinstalling Windows.

 

[ndashutosh parekh]

Good thought Snooze777... how can one tell is this SMART tech is installed on the machine ?. I don't have any bad sectors on my drives (C,D)
C= SSD (OS installed)
D = traditional spinner (personal data)

 

[ndashutosh parekh]

Just wanted to post an update --
So I let the laptop takes its own course and finally after about 3 hours of spinning the machine is now back to normal.
I am going try to find out looking into the logs the source of the issue.
I did not install or uninstall anything. I will post another update on my finding if any from the logs.

However I did check the windows update screen and found this interesting message.

"We can't install some updates because other updates are in progress. Restarting your computer may help, and we'll keep trying to update."

So the system has given up on trying to install for now at least. I suspect once is restart the machine it will be trigger the spinning again.

Keep you all posted.

 

[Vince Massi]

Since there is more than one possible cause, there is more than one possible solution.

Try the suggestion to just let it run for a while. Windows might be installing updates.

If it's a desktop, turn it off, open it, and blow it out with canned air. If it is a laptop, make sure the exit vent is blowing out air. Turn the laptop off, and shoot a short blast into the exit vent.

Install the free Wind Patrol program. It has tabs to let you see your start-up programs. Don't disable anything that says "Microsoft," but you can carefully disable one program at a time to see what happens.

Go to Task Manager--File--Run New Task. Type powershell into the box that appears and check the box giving you Administrator Privileges, and then hit Enter. Give PowerShell several seconds to load, and type sfc /scannow into the command line. It will take about an hour or so to scan your hard drive for corrupt files. (I don't think that's your problem, but it won't hurt).

 

[Snooze77777]

Good thought Snooze777... how can one tell is this SMART tech is installed on the machine ?. I don't have any bad sectors on my drives (C,D)
C= SSD (OS installed)
D = traditional spinner (personal data)

Smart Firmware is installed on all modern hard drives at the factory

 

[glnla]

Hi, since installing windows 10, initially fine now recently my hard drive runs constantly even when idle, it slows everything down and is becoming a real pain especially going online! When it is doing this there seems no obvious reason, i.e. it is not downloading updates, running defrag or disc check. Maybe I'm missing something obvious, but I'm not a tech head so do not want to do anything drastic to solve this; anyone any ideas on this please let me know

I had the same problem and tried some of the suggestions below but what worked for me was turning of automatic disk optimizer in the defrag area. the only thing is you will have to do a manual optimize every so often to keep the disk optimized and defraged.

 

[Iron Arm]

If you chose to use the new Photo application, that's probably what it is. Do a search for "Photos", Open the app. If you see a "Refresh" thing spinning, there's your answer. it's creating collections or albums for you.

 

[keith l terrill]

Not applicable in my situation.

Just to update y'all: I solved the problem by 1) reverting to Win7 and then 2) installing and using a Linux as my main OS (on all my computers). Best decision I ever made.

 

[ndashutosh parekh]

Hello all,
This post will.bring some insight.
My issue with spinning drive was the fact that installation never finishes. Specifically update to Windows defender.
So I took a radical approach.
1 created another user with admin privs
2 logged into new user
3 launched Windows update.
4 update took about 40 mins to successfully complete
5 spinning stopped update completed
6 logged out and logged in with original user and machine is normal. Drive no longer pegging CPU
Hope this works for others

 

[jani]

had same issue. system reserve disk was framgmented

 

[Iron Arm]

had same issue. system reserve disk was framgmented

Windows automatically defrags drives, or does not if you disable it. Even if you're right, that would be a one time thing. People are complaining because Windows 10 seems to be ALWAYS chugging away at something. It could be Windows Defender scanning, building photo albums, search indexing, etc. Whatever it is, it happens often.

 

[Tiribulus]

Disable the super-fetch (prefetch) service.

 

[Decahedron]

My normal suggestion is always the same.
Give it time, let your computer run, (especially idle as that is when windows does a lot of background tasks), people are frequently rebooting and Windows never get's a chance to catch up.

Go here
Control Panel\All Control Panel Items\Administrative Tools\Resource Monitor
Select the Disk tab from along the top.
Take a look at the information and see if you can get a sense of what is hitting your disk with all the read / writes.

Same trouble with me but after much PC perusing by this non-pro, it seems to be a ghost in the system, flitting around spanking systems at random for seconds at a time - Pulling my hair out