Vista Excessive Disk Activity

For the past few weeks I have been attempting to create a Vista Home
Premium configuration on a new Core 2 Duo PC. I though that I had
finally created a stable config with all the proper hardware drivers and
many of my apps. I then noticed that the disk activity light was on
solid - and I couldn't figure out why.

I ran a number of process tools, the only one that seemed to provide
useful information being Perfmon. Perfmon showed two distinct types of
disk activity.

The first, was causing the disk activity light to stay on solid, and was
caused by the reading of files on my D: data disk. I found that by
stopping/starting the SysMain Superfetch service I can turn off/turn on
this constant disk read activity. It appears that Superfetch looks
through previously opened user data files - even if they were used only
once, are 4+GB in size, and may never be used again from within VISTA.
It is beyond my comprehension what possible good this type of activity
would do me, or any other VISTA user. After I get to the point where
I've installed Lightroom/Photoshop/Picasa/PaperPort and other apps that
routinely access and/or index GB of user files - will access to my D:
drive ever stop? Why would Superfetch bother with non-executable data
files on a non-system partition? After reading the MS VISTA Kernel
description I know that turning off SuperFetch will impact certain VISTA
features - so what?.

Second issue: I noticed a secondary disk activity that consists of
continuous writes to various files on C: that occur at the rate of a few
each second. Again, I attempted to isolate that IO activity with
Perfmon, including noting the PIDs and then attempting to stop the
Applications with that PID - with no success.

In an attempt to further diagnose the issues, I restored a C: partition
backup for the first OOTB Vista configuration (no updates, drivers, apps
installed). The steady drone of repeated disk writes to C: also occurs
in that base build. The disk writes involves areas such as:

files lastalive0.dat and lastalive1.dat
from svchost LocalSystemNetworkRestricted.

c:\windows\system32\config\SOFTWARE
c:\$Logfile (NTFS Volume Log)
c:\windows\System32\config\DEFAULT
from System

This is my only Vista system, so I have none other to compare it to.

I've turned off Indexing, turned off Defender, uninstalled AVG, turned
off disk defrags, and disabled all items in the Scheduler - the C: disk
activity goes on.

I find all this disk IO activity unwanted, distracting, and possibly
damaging to disk drive health in the long term. I don't understand why
this type of activity should be necessary for a single-user desktop PC
and why it is so darned difficult to determine what is causing it.

I'd appreciate any assistance in explaining what this constant disk C:
write activity might be, what other diagnostic tools I could use to
isolate the causes, and how to stop it (other than to install WINXP or
buy a Mac).

Just wanted to let you know I'm having the same problems. Nothing gets
me so totally mad as when the hard drive is going crazy. I intensely
hope that it is not a virus spreading around the drive

For the record, I've turned off:
*indexing
*defragmenting
*superfetch (from services.msc)

I've turned off my paging file too.

You could try right clicking on the dis drive icon and in properties
turn off "Index this drive..." whatever. Seems like that made a
difference fo me, and since I rarely use "Search" functions the indexing
time is just wasted.

Definitely not excessive paging - just read activity to very specific
data files and write activity to very specific VISTA files.

I'll gladly turn Superfetch back on if anyone tell me how to keep it
from reading through every data file that I've ever opened - including
5+GB data and backup files. So far, disabling Superfetch has only made
things much better. (Unless Perfmon and my disk activity light are lying.)

whoa.... actually I had 1 user connected to my computer when I disabled
my shared folders. I thought I was safe since I live out in the country
(and no other houses in the vicinity) but I guess the internet makes us
all unsafe :/

Hope this helps.... this crazy disk is making me crazy too!

I'm seeing this too. I noticed it after I set Power Options-Advanced
Settings- Hard Disk-Turn Off Hard Disk After to 5 minutes on a new laptop and
found that the hard disk keeps running indefinitely. Reliability and
Performance monitor shows that six files, including C:\$Logfile and C:\$Mft,
get written to every few seconds like a heartbeat, even when the system is
fully idle. I searched the web and found only one forum thread that has
relevant information:

The last entry by Shyster1 is the most informative, but still doesn't
explain why the "heartbeat" writes are necessary.

This behavior raises some questions:

1) Does forcing the system drive to run constantly make sense from a system
responsiveness/performance point of view? In other words, would the user be
annoyed by having to wait for the system drive to spin up every now and again?

2) Does it make sense to display the "Turn off Hard Disk After" power option
in systems that have only one (system) drive? Does this feature affect
external USB drives for instance? If it only applies to internal hard
drives, then it shouldn't show if a system has only one drive.

3) If the "Turn off Hard Disk After" power option actually worked for the
system drive, would Vista be significantly more energy efficient than it is?
Since hard drives draw a fair amount of power, I'm guessing the answer is
yes. There's an obvious trade off here between energy efficiency and
usability (i.e. #1 above), but perhaps users should be allowed to decide what
is best for them.

[l-o-g-o]

I too am new to Vista and was having the same problems as above. I don't know exactly what the service "SERVER" is for, but, i can tell you that when i disabled that service and rebooted, all the excessive disk read problems i had disappeared and my boot and shutdown times became lightning fast.

With increasing CPU speed and multiple kernels the disk has become the real bottleneck. It is strange Microsoft engineers does not acknowledge this and make system software that minimize diskusage!

I found turning off indexing and Superfetch/ReadyBoost made my hardisk calm just within a few seconds after boot and thats great.

The cyclic writes to C:\$LogFile(NTFS Volume log), C:\$Mft(NTFS...) and logfiles in C:\Windows\System32\config directory I haven't found a way to turn off. It is probably not possible. They cause a contionus approximate write load of 10-20 KB/sec. I hope Microsoft adds an option were logging can be customized and eventually turned off.

[vosuram]

Vista made my HP HDX-18 laptop (quad-core, 4GB, 1TB) virtually unusable. It came to unstoppable disk abuse, making, for instance, impossible to connect any large external hard drive. The Performance monitor shows that system is all the time busy with writing to files in the "System Volume Information" folder. Switching off the "system restore" helps: "Start menu" -> Right click on "Computer" -> Properties -> Advanced Settings -> System Protection ... Uncheck all boxes.

I'm wondering with the following: Toyota recall cars and patches them for free if any production defect is discovered. Vista is mainly made of defects, but I have to pay for an upgrade to "7".

As I said, in the "Performance monitor" I see the "System" continuously writing to the "System Volume Information" (sub)folder with a long name {****-****...} typical for system restore points folders. BTW, also "System" is intensively using the swap although only about half of memory is in use.

Unfortunately it may be not the only reason for the problem, because switching off the "System restore" helped only partially, i.e.: crazy disk activity finally is coming to almost zero after few seconds of the system in idle state, but it is still impossible to copy a large directory (several GB, thousands of small files) on an external USB hard drive. First the transfer rate is gradually decreasing to ~1MB/s, then the "copy files" window stops responding. However if in the case with the "System Restore" ON the very final state is completely dead system (Alt+Ctrl+Del leads to the black screen with mouse "please wait" cursor on it), with the "System Resore" in OFF it is possible to get after Alt+Ctrl+Del the Task Manager and to kill the hung "copy files" window (actually, to kill and restart the File Explorer).

P.S. I tried 2 different types of the 1TB USB drives, the picture is the same
P.P.S. Additional observation: it seems 1 core gets loaded completely while other 3 are almost idle

Reformulating your message in an instructive way: stay with XP as long as it is sufficient for your needs, Vista has no functional improvements compare to XP. Did you mean that?

Then I agree, Vista a the crappiest product of Microsoft. No one OS except Vista is capable to freeze a top-end machine with no external (to the OS components) applications running.

So how have you diagnosed that it is a Vista problem and not a hardware
problem or caused by other software?

Your message about intense disk activity in Vista is dead on, but I doubt
there's anything you can do about it. My Vista system works the hard drive
much of the time, and I've got indexing turned off, no anti-virus scanning
(except Defender), and no Norton crap installed. It's a mystery!

My new Windows 7 system is much more kind to its hard drive. Vista is just
Vista, and there's probably nothing you can do to it to behave like XP, for
example. Yours is a common problem, and everyone with Vista experiences
it -- they just don't realize it!

[hershey444]

I know this is Vista forum but I find it fascinating that I stumbled onto this thread researching the same exact problem in WINDOWS 7. What a bumma. Its driving me crazy. I just bought this brand new new high horsepower, fancy shmancy desktop with latest and greatest WIN7 hoping it would last 10 years like my last computer, and now it seems doomed to an early demise.

My troubleshooting experiments are identical to this thread. Why should we have to know or care about such complicated services and have to decide if necessary or not. Turning off System Restore (yes, I did it, and yes it helped) and other Windows "features" should not be necessary to "save" our computers. I want the features and I want the disk to last too. And I just want to "drive the car" so to speak. I don't want to rebuild the engine first.

I'm really thinking mac next time...

[bendi]

I also find annoying the behaviour that Windows writes something to $Logfile and $Mft every couple of seconds. It also seems for me that it may be unhealthy for disk drive.

Sorry for digging out this topic, but I have already browsed almost everything possible on the web and my symptoms look exactly the same as these here described. I'm also not using Vista, but Windows 7 64-bit.

I tried everything:
- Indexing - DISABLED
- System Restore - DISABLED
- Pagefile - DISABLED
- Windows Defender - DISABLED
- NtfsDisableLastAccessUpdate in registry - set to 1
- Superfetch - currently enabled, but I tried with disabled too - it's not the cause
- Antivirus - ESET NOD32 - it also happens with protection turned off (however I haven't try uninstalling it completely yet)

Do you have some suggestions what else may cause this behavior?

hershley444, I saw your posts on this topic in some other forums... Maybe did you find the solution to this problem?

[ssuing8825]

I'm having the same exact issue. It's so painful. This might be the last windows machine for me.

[Expertz]

Originally Posted by ssuing8825

I'm having the same exact issue. It's so painful. This might be the last windows machine for me.

What kind of problem are you facing, can you elaborate it or specify it in more details? Disk activity (at any time, not just after booting) can be due to lots of things, including:

1. The indexing service, which makes your searches faster, and is thus a GOOD THING
2. Superfetch, which speculatively preloads files into RAM that it "expects" you to need (based on your usage patterns so far), which greatly increases response times and is thus a GOOD THING

[megman]

I started experiencing this very same thing over a week ago. Finally did a reboot today and got an Adobe update notification.

Installed it and it went away.

Just my 2 cents.