Windows 8 hangs due to disk 100%

Trojan

Anyone getting long periods of unresponsiveness (which resolve themselves) due to 100% disk activity? I'm getting frequent 100% usage periods, figure may be to do with pagefile or similar. Any tips for troubleshooting?

I'm seeing this on Vertex 3 SSD in a SATA II slot on XPS420.

Capt'n Midnight

if these work it might give clues diskmon doesn't list the apps writing to disks 'cos that would be too easy

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals

Odaise Gaelach

Does the Task Manager not show you what application is using 100% disk activity?

Trojan

Odaise Gaelach wrote: »

Does the Task Manager not show you what application is using 100% disk activity?

It does - none

Trojan

Might be Firefox related (v10.0.2 latest non-beta release)

Image: Task Manager (Performance tab) plus Resource Monitor
Image: Task Manager (Processes tab)

(Diskmon gives me nothing sadly)

Cuddlesworth

If your disk becomes unresponsive due to a IO issue then it shows up as 100% with no activity.

BostonB

I didn't have any problems with a regular disk. It might depend on what you are doing.

Do you have a lot of data like music on your drive. Those folder types can hog resources as it meta indexes the music.

cherryghost

It's more than likely a SATA controller issue, apparently its a bug that's causing widespread issuses, not just confined to your specific problem, but a range of others too.

Trojan

cherryghost wrote: »

It's more than likely a SATA controller issue, apparently its a bug that's causing widespread issuses, not just confined to your specific problem, but a range of others too.

Hey cherryghost, do you have a link to any discussions on this issue?

stevenmu

Have you checked your memory usage, if your open applications are using more memory than you have available then pagefile hell is inevitable.

cherryghost

Trojan wrote: »

Hey cherryghost, do you have a link to any discussions on this issue?

Sorry just saw this now. My brother and my friend suffered the same fate as yourself. My friend has the exact same issue and hasn't been solved. My brother got to that state whenever Windows 8 attempted to install. His fix was to change the SATA controller options in the bios to AHCI instead of SATA. He had no problem after.

How big is the pagefile on your ssd might I ask?

EDIT: Another thing might be to update the firmware on the SSD if the above doesn't work.

Trojan

Just to show symptoms:

Capt'n Midnight

stupid question, it's not indexing ?

is it like the way vista used to be slow on large transfers ?

if you have enough ram try turning off paging file for a while [straw => clutch]

Vico1612

Does Procmon highlight any process taking up write/read activity ?
http://live.sysinternals.com/Procmon.exe