Excessive harddisk access after 5 minutes
Hallo, when booting up Windows7 exactly after 5 minutes (not idling) the system starts to scan the HDDs for 1-2mins every time. It shows up clearly in Ressourcemonitor and XPerf but its not visible in Process Explorer so i cannot determine the exact source. I don't know what it is but its very reliably present after every systemboot . Maybe its something new from SP1. If i kill the corresponding service host (svchost.exe) Aero turns off as well. I didn't find anything in the scheduler (for the last 10min). Anyone else noticed this as well? Any ideas how to analyze it any further? Windows7 32Bit SP1 (RTM 7601.17514.101119-1850)
February 15th, 2011 1:55pm

Start Task Manager. Click on the Processes tab. Click View, Select columns and add IO Reads and IO writes. Click on the IO Reads column title to sort. Do the same for IO writes to see if you can identify the culprit. My guess would be Windows search indexing. Jerry
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February 15th, 2011 4:14pm

'Windows Search" service is disabled already. I tried to record the behavior with a screen recorder but once user harddisk throughput is sensed the service waits until resources are free again. Can anyone on SP1 try to reproduce that on his system? Boot up, start Ressourcemonitor (jn taskmanager) and wait 5min.
February 15th, 2011 6:10pm

Running Windows 7 Enterprise SP1 x64. Could not reproduce the issue. What anti-virus software are you using?
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February 16th, 2011 4:05am

ReadyBoot writes the boot plan with low IO priority to the HDD."A programmer is just a tool which converts caffeine into code" CLIP- Stellvertreter http://www.winvistaside.de/
February 16th, 2011 9:35am

Those files in 'C:\Windows\Prefetch\ReadyBoot' are touched immediately (not after 5min). Checked the system with 'Avira AntiVir' BootCD (Isolinux). Didn't find anything. I searched for touched files (in \windows and all subfolders) that fall in that time range 22:30-22:32 (pic below). These files may be derived from windows update. Disabled the service but didn't change anything. I'm not sure what those 'wild numbered' files are though. They hold scrambled/compressed data.
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February 16th, 2011 6:19pm

give me the complete boot trace and I can look at it."A programmer is just a tool which converts caffeine into code" CLIP- Stellvertreter http://www.winvistaside.de/
February 16th, 2011 6:28pm

Looks like its the 'Superfetch' service. I disabled it and a first test shows no access at all after 5min. I will keep an eye on it. Thanks for helping.
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February 17th, 2011 4:22pm

disabling Superfetch is the worst thing you can do!!!!! It slows down the PC dramatically unless you use a SSD."A programmer is just a tool which converts caffeine into code" CLIP- Stellvertreter http://www.winvistaside.de/
February 17th, 2011 4:43pm

Just for some bootups to confirm its responsible for the heavy disk access... ;)
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February 17th, 2011 5:13pm

after enabling Superfetch, train ReadyBoot/Superfetch again: http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=140262 otherwise your Windows boots slowly."A programmer is just a tool which converts caffeine into code" CLIP- Stellvertreter http://www.winvistaside.de/
February 17th, 2011 5:42pm

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