I’ve had a Samsung 850 EVO 250gb since around xmas. I installed the Magician software and did all the optimization stuff, but have largely ignored it since. Today I opened it up on a whim, and it is happy to report that I’ve written 7.5TB. Uhhh… dear lord no I haven’t?!
What can I do to figure out where all this extra disk writing is coming from? Is this merely normal when having swap placed on the SSD?
No known viruses or anything, done the malwarebytes scans and all that. It isn’t like the disk is constantly grinding in task manager that I see…
Could you have some sort of periodic disk optimization or cleanup turned on for the volume? It’s supposed to be turned off for SSDs but who knows. Also could be indexing, defrag, page file… Do you have trim enabled? There are so many pitfalls :-(
That volume of late does seem troublesome for such a short period.
Trim is enabled, and no (known) optimizations turned on - just whatever Win10 does on its own (which is supposed to be TRIM only for SSDs). I do have a pagefile there, but that seems extreme - I can’t imagine the pagefile is being hit that heavily.
Not a refurb either :( I’ve shut off system restore points and moved the swap. It is possible that whatever was wrong has already been corrected and I’m just seeing the aftermath now, but very annoying to not know what it is/was. Gotta remember to keep an eye on it.
My 840 EVO (also Win10) has been installed for 18 months, and has 8.3TB written. That’s with constant, daily use (it’s my work machine as well as my gaming machine).
I gave up and did a Windows 10 ‘reset’. The event viewer had heaps of log messages about windows update failing (oddly, not errors, just tons of informational messages) and it was still writing vast amounts of crap from somewhere - without ever using up disk space. I’ll give it a few days to settle after I’m done installing things and see where it is at. Not amusing, and worse that I failed in tracking it down and had to resort to the nuclear option.
I don’t know how 10 does things, but on 7 when I have had problems it generates huge amounts of error log files, but then truncates and rotates them so they don’t grow too big. So, if this is a long-term thing, it is essentially churning the disk IO for no purpose.
I think that was the exact issue sillhouette. Which is why I never noticed anything amiss until Magician told me.
Further details for anyone that stumbles across this in the future. Though I reinstalled (I actually did a reset - not totally clean as Woolen points out), I found guides about doing ‘sfc /scannow’. That found corruption, and wasn’t able to repair. That led to learning about dism, which also needed help to clean up corrupted files via the techbench ISO.
Once DISM was happy, sfc was able to do its thing successfully. I believe I’m once again back where I should be. The sfc/dism duo may have fixed things without having to have done the reset - lessons learned.
I noticed after installing win10 on my laptop (but not my desktop, suggesting it’s specific to some hardware) that my disk usage was constantly at 100%. I looked it up and there are numerous articles detailling the problem and what to try. I followed a youtube video’s suggestions to turn off some background windows services which solved the problem for me (I dont’ remember which one). I don’t know if this is causing your problem, but it might stand to reason if your drive is writing things at 100% constantly, even when idle, you might see your results?
Daagar, I’ve never heard of/used dism before – thanks for the heads up! I actually used it on one of my machines which was reporting errors with SFC /scannow but wouldn’t repair them last night, and, lo and behold, I am now error free (at least until something else fucks up).
Glad it was useful! It seems to have solved my issues, as the disk writes are no longer increasing out of control.
My own suspicion based on what I saw in the Event Viewer before I did the reset is that Win10 was stuck in a state of constantly trying to do some sort of update (of possibly a very large patch or set of patches) and was failing every time (so incurring the disk writes of re-obtaining said patch(es), and then spamming a log of its failures). The DISM/SFC combo put things back (as would have an actual clean install vs a reset, but hey - learning!)
