Recently my hard disk corrupted and my HDD reported as being 100% in use all the time. This slowed my computer to a crawl and became totally unusable at times. I fixed it by changing it with an SSD. However: I noticed the Task Manager looked something like this. Notice disk usage is at 100% even when applications are using 0.1Mbps.   However, I've noticed while reading and writing anything that speeds easily cross 100Mbps but the usage stays at 70-80%. So my question what value is this a % of?
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After startup for 5 minutes my system is very slow. The Task Manager shows that the disk usage is at 100%. (Later this number is around 2-4 %, but sometimes for 1-2 minutes go up again at 100%.)  I searched a lot on Google. For example I read , and also other pages. I opened two topic on Microsoft answer.  and one in Hungarian.  But I didn't found the solution yet. So I would like to ask Community's help. :)  Here the steps I already done:   I disabled everything at startups (including services) and the issue is the same.  I disabled Prefetch and Superfetch, the Baground Intellingent Transmission, Windows Search and Windows Defender but the issue is still persists. I made a health check on HDD, I made defrag and file system error check, but there are no errors. Also I tried to reinstall the HDD's driver. I made a full hardware check up, with no errors. The Windows and all the drivers are up-to-date. I tried a clean start. The issue is the same. I deleted Dropbox and all antivirus. I turned of the MSI mode.      I using also Linux, where this error is not occurs. Good to know, that Windows had 4 partitions, but I deleted 2 of them for the Linux. I don't know what partitions was these but both was only 10 - 20 MB.  I using a Dell Inspiron 15R SE 7520 with Windows 10 Home.  Personally I think it can be the Intel Rapid Store Technology "driver", because the problem started around when I installed it. (However I'm not sure.) And my hardware not supported yet by Intel, so I have no the newest driver. However I deleted Intel's software and driver and the issue is the same.    Thank you in advance for your assistance!
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Why does my MBP sometimes report VM Size: 300+ GB in Activity Monitor under System Memory tab, when my hard disk size is only 250 GB (total) and RAM is 4GB? I know it can't magically get that extra space, but what is it trying to tell me?
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Do you guys know how much time needs to pass until the data stored on a hard drive starts to degrade?   To keep the data intact for long periods of time, I heard you need to periodically rewrite it on the hard drive, like every 5 years or so. Is it true?
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I'm asking this because my HDD (Hard Disk) has 5 years, and ultimately (this year) it gave me many headaches. Many moths ago I has Windows 7 (and 10 T.P. since april) and all was good. But after a moment, instantly, all gets reversed: veeery slow, and actions which will take a tiny time, at these moment the time seems frozen (for example, instead a 1 minute boot, it turned to 5-8 minutes boot). I formatted and installed Windows every 2 months because it was the time which runs good before it gets slooww. Seeing the abuse of privacity in W10, I changed to Ubuntu 15.04 and the things lasted more in time... But again, HDD error. Click, trying to read, click, trying to read... And the upper bar (title of window/buttons of volume, language, wifi, etc.) disappeared. The left bar (where are the app's icons) was empty and the file explorer said the resource wasn't available (or something like these error). I restarted and nothing happens. I had to press CTRL+D to boot-up Ubuntu, but after hours... the same error (can't do anything except moving the mouse/cursor).  Welcome to the routine: copy files with live-cd to a pendrive, wipe HDD and install all again. And the things was calmed again... and the errors comes again. And after 2 weeks, I had to do the same. Now my PC works fine, but yesterday I heard a few "clicks" from the HDD.  Now, I remembered this  and I came to Disks and the HDD shows a new value; normally, the problematic number was "pending sectors", always changing, but now, in "irrecoverable sectors", the number is different of zero.  I never had "reallocated sectors". Now, neither. And now, while I write this lines, I've 5 "pending s." and 9 "irrecoverable s.". If this helps, the "read error rate" is 42, 5 for "write error rate".      Very well!! While I was writing "write error rate", I heard 2   clicks. And while writing this, one click more.   And 123 "CRC error rate". So, with this information: is my HDD dying? It'll last days or months? I think this problem will kill the disk in a not very far time.  The drive is a Western Digital Green 1TB-WDC WD10EARS-00Y5B1 (80.00A80) S.N.: WD-WCAV5J301610  PS: When I boot with CTRL+D, many times the system is in "RO mode"; I can't save/download files, Unity doesn't find apps when I write their name {click again, now, while I write the text} and, after a few hours, a crash like the lines above
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Hello I want to know if is it possible to mark bad blocks on HDD for OS to not use them. I don't want to save data written on this blocks, just want to get rid of them.  I found some article where author describe how to partition disk to avoid using bad blocks of HDD.  I count how many MB from the start are OK. And also how many MB from end are OK. It looks like I will lost about 50GB of storage space but it is quite fine for me when the disk will run one year more.  First I split disk to 2 partitions:   From beginning to around 190 GB From 190GB to the end   Then I made surface scan of 2nd partition and everything was OK. I was really happy cause i though that finally I will succeed.  Than I wanted to copy all data from 1st partition to 2nd BUT in some data a problem occurs. I/O error. I'd say it is Read problem but when I open file on which copying failed it runs OK, for example some pdf files didn't copied but I opened them.  What can be problem can it be a Write problem? But why there is a problem when surface scan on whole 2nd partition was fine?  What can I do(except buying new HDD)? Can I somehow do this partitioning and use just partition with good sectors? Will it work? How are data stored on the disk? Can I determine where the data will be written?
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I am getting a 50% larger "Size on Disk" than the "Size" of files would lead me to expect, as linked. I have some idea from other posts that I have read about cluster size and small file allocation to clusters causing waste but would that account for 300GB extra space used/wasted?    Any ideas on how I could resolve this disparity and reduce the Size on Disk please?
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I had approximately 50Gb of Windows VMs on my MacBook Pro internal SSD (128Gb) (OS X 10.7.3).  I copied them to an external drive, then deleted them from the internal drive, then emptied the Trash.    When I look at disk usage in Activity Monitor it shows the same level of usage as it did prior to deleting 50Gb of files.   Any ideas why the space hasn't been freed up?
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I'm trying to determine what's eating almost half of disk on my Windows 7 Lenovo laptop but haven't been able to determine what.  I read some of the answers on this site but none of the causes seems to be the cause of my problem.  What I've done so far:   Checked Windows' System Restore points but only minimum use, either way I deleted around 2GB if usage from there Used WinDirStat and it came back with a total of 71.3GB usage at the root level C Drives properties says 135GB being used out of 138 GB total, ie, 135 GB - 71.3GB = 63.7GB missing somewhere No "Unknown" files reported by WinDirStat Windows Disk Management utility doesn't report any unused partitions or unclaimed space chkdsk comes out clean Windows disk cleanup tool doesn't report anything big, just small stuff in the lower MB range Lenovo backup tool hasn't been used nor there is a folder for the backup images   Any idea on what to look at and/or do?  EDIT: some additional info...
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There is only one partition for both system files and personal data, which is C:. The other two partitions are for boot and for recovery.  Now I have two different reports on the size of C: on my Windows 7:   by clicking the property of C:, it shows 59.4 GB for "used space"; by selecting all contents (I have setup to view all hidden files and directories) under C: and viewing their property, it shows 46.9 GB for "size" and 47.6 GB for "size on disk".   Here are my questions:   I was wondering why the two reports are not the same, and where the difference comes? in the second way, why "size" and "size on disk" are different? What do they mean actually? What is the difference between them and "used space" in the first way?   Thanks in advance!
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What explains the discrepancy in usage (82 GB vs 13 GB) that I see below?   Using df:  $ df -h / Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/sda2              96G   82G  9.9G  90% /  Using du:  $ sudo du -cshx / 13G     / 13G     total
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My old laptop has become utterly slow and unresponsive to the extent that after loading it takes a good 30-40 mins before I can even use it. It's mostly in an unresponsive state and doesn't change even if I do a hard restart. I did a SMART test and it shows my hard disk is 58% healthy.   I read somewhere on a forum that the OS or the NTFS disk itself will mark bad sectors and wouldn't write to them. So my question is, my disk is 750 GB, 58% of which is 435GB. My total data on the disk is roughly 300 GB. But I think the hard disk may still be reading/writing to those bad sectors and thus my system is not responsive. So my question is, can I do something in order to block all those bad sectors and use the left over good sectors only ? Most importantly, will it be a good idea in first place or should I just replace the old hard drive?   Note: This is an old computer and I only use it occasionally to stream movies on my tv via hdmi.
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I'm thinking of installing an SSD on my machine at home, and the easiest way to do this is basically to clone my current hard drive over to the new SSD. Trouble is, if I right click on my current hard drive and select properties, my used space is 230GB, thus requiring me to buy a monster SSD.   However, if I right click on each of the top level folders in my hard drive and select properties, the total space used by those folders is only 140GB. 100GB of that is music and movies, which I can easily clean out before the move to the SSD.  So here's the rub, where did the other 90GB go? For the life of me I can't figure it out. Shouldn't the sum of the used sizes of all the top level folders in your C: drive roughly equal the used size of the C: drive itself?
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I have a similar issue as . You can pretty much take his screen shot and apply it to my issue: Windows 8.1, 99% disk usage or in that vicinity for a longer period of time (minutes). Yet the individual disk usage stats don't add up to more than roughly 1MB/Sec. I have an SSD disk capable of much higher throughput.  The question I linked to doesn't provide much answer, but one comment hints to low free disk space. That is an issue with my disk. I have only ~1GB left of free space on my C drive. But my follow-up question is why would that matter? Windows does pre-allocate 6GB of virtual drive, doesn't it? At least that's how I interpret "currently allocated" in the Virtual Memory settings screen under System Properties &rarr; Performance options.  I've tried to use the  to gain some information on what's using the disk, but the amount of data logged in just a couple of seconds is so vast that I don't know where to start. The only thing I see is that service.exe accesses the registry a lot... But I guess that's normal? If anyone care to take a look, the log dump is  (19MB)  To summarize:   Does the disk usage really go up when free space declines? If so, why? Can anyone deduct from my Procmon log file what program or process causes 99% disk usage?   edit: To comment on the "malware"-answer in the other post: I'd like to know, not guess. I doubt it is malware in my case, but if it is, my logs should show that.  update: Similar case just happened. Any clues from these two ResMon screenshots?      "System" doesn't really tell me much.
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My laptop has recently started to become a bit unreliable, and for some reason I started to suspect that my HDD was starting to fail. After a bit of hunting on the internet, I found Ubuntu's Disk Utility in the System menu and ran the long SMART diagnostics from this.  However, since the documentation for Disk Utility is very poor (palimpsest?), I'm not sure how to interpret the results:    For example, the Read Error Rate is over 50 million (!), yet the Assessment is rated "Good".   So would someone mind explaining to me how to interpret the results of these tests (especially the Normalized, Worst, Threshold and Value numbers)? And maybe tell me what they think of the results I got for my HDD? (Thanks)
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My Windows 10 laptop with an i7 and 16 GB of RAM often gets the fans going full speed when I am not using it. It is a bit slow to respond sometimes when I try to wake it up to check what is going on. Every time I try to open the Task Manager to check out the Details tab and see what is using the CPU, nothing shows up. I'm running as admin, and all tasks are showing. I am guessing the system is hiding what it is working on because it is seen as a "system" task.  What is a good tool to use that will monitor and report what is utilizing CPU? I've used ProcMon before, but I didn't find the output particularly accurate or helpful.  More importantly, how can I stop this from happening? I am quite annoyed that so much software feels the need to do things when my computer is idle. Is there something like ZoneAlarm, but for CPU?
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How can I visualize which folders and files are taking up all of the space on my hard drive?  I'm getting some conflicting reports on the size of hard drive contents. Namely what is and isn't there and what folders are actually using the space.   I need to know which of the files or folders the culprits behind all this hidden bloat. Also there should be a print option to get it on paper.
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I have been feeling this way for a while, looking at task manager mentally ballparking how much physical memory should be in use, and noticing a large disparity. I finally got around to measuring it. Taking the results of tasklist and adding, gave about 3.87 GB. Task manager told me I was using 4.6 GB of memory. This seems like a large disparity. Where did it go?  EDIT: So its clear, it is not going to prefetch. It has also been suggested that its part of the OS, but not part of any of the system processes. If this is true, please find a way to get the OS to tell me how much memory is getting used. Since I want to find out where the memory went, asking me to look at the difference does nothing for me.  EDIT 2: It is not the following:   The kernel The cache Hardware reserved memory   Picture of resources taken up. Not quite sure what it will do but...