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technophobe · ‎09-25-2015

Hi all

I've had the laptop for about 4 months now. It has 256GB SSD and 1TB HDD pre-installed and I have not modified the laptop at all. In fact, I only ever use the SSD and have left the 1TB HDD empty because I have not needed them yet.

Earlier this week I noticed that the laptop was making more noise than usual - sounding like the typical disk activity you hear from a mechanical HDD rather than SSD. It is doing this every few seconds. I looked on Windows Explorer and noticed that the 1TB HDD (split into 2 500GB partitions by default) was now showing disk usage of 16.1GB...!? I've opened the drive (enabled "show hidden files") but it looks completely empty. I can't see any data stored there and I also can't format the drive (it says the drive is in use - which could explain the constant noises...)

Really not sure what has happened here or what to do ... it was completely fine last weekend! Has anyone else come across this problem or could you suggest a fix?

Thanks!

Edweird · ‎09-25-2015

I've had this happen to me several times - check your processes in Task Manager - you'll find that a system process or something else is loading the drive above 90% for no apparent reason. The memory use you're seeing could be related to a page file being managed by Windows.

It could be that something went screwy with paging.

Get us a screenshot of your Task Manager process tree.

NeoBeum · ‎09-25-2015

Is this Windows 10?

technophobe · ‎09-25-2015

Hi - thanks for the input guys. It's Windows 8.1. After opening task manager and going to the performance > disk activity tab, you are right - under "disk activity" there seems to be a lot going on with E:/pagefile.sys (E: drive is the HDD, that I have never used and so should be completely empty)

McAfee seems to be using it too.

Any ideas how I can fix this?

Thanks

Edweird · ‎09-25-2015

Go to Advanced System Settings (you can find it by searching in Start menu), go to Advanced > Performance/Settings > Performance Options/Advanced > Virtual Memory/Change > No Paging File > Set.

This will null the paging. See if that fixes it. If it's alright afterwards, you can set it back to system managed size.
If you have 16GB of RAM or more, though, it's probably best to just have it off. Probably not nice to have Windows poking around and constantly writing to your SSD, anyways.

Either way, Samsung recommends having virtual memory enabled on the drive with 200mb initial and 2gb max.

Corporal · ‎09-25-2015

McAfee seems to be using it too.

Ugh, get rid of that thing! 😉

youtube . com/watch?v=bKgf5PaBzyg

Edweird · ‎09-25-2015

I don't even use 3rd party stuff.
Windows Defender is 100% enough for me.

technophobe · ‎09-26-2015

With your help I think I have fixed it 🙂

I tried turning off the page file as you said in system settings - it was set to 16GB on the E: drive, so it must have been the culprit. However, even after turned off it didn't seem to change anything. So it got me wondering about what might have changed since the weekend (when all was fine) - I did a Windows Restore to a previous checkpoint and now it's fixed! I can format E: drive to clear the page file. Page file settings seem to have gone back to default again - C: (SSD) drive and 2GB. No idea what could have messed with the page file settings before? Maybe a dodgy Windows Update?

Either way, thanks for your help everyone 🙂 Was beginning to think there may have been a hardware fault. When I shut down there seemed to be an odd whirring noise after a few seconds - probably the fans or HDD stopping though...?

Edweird · ‎09-26-2015

Yeah, I have the noise on mine, it's the fans. You should only hear the HDD spooling down if you hold the power button and force a surprise shut down, Normally, the drive stops operating before the actual shut down is complete.

Glad it worked out either way.

G751JT-T7115H - HDD constant activity / noise and 16GB mystery disk usage...