Samsung Series 9 - Disk goes to 100% frequently for no reason and cripples system

I'm not sure what's causing this problem or whether its related to my HD, OS or, bios, but I have a series 9 running windows 8 and for whatever reason, my disk will go up to 100% usage randomly and make my system stutter fairly frequently. I could understand if this was caused by a large amount of data being written to the disk, but normally the usage is something like 2.0 mb/s by the process is System, so it doesnt appear to be a program I am running, If anyone has any insight I'd appreciate it. Also, I was wondering if this was a known issue with the series 9 or the sandisk SSD used in it.

Edit: I will say this, I do notice that it does often happen when I'm downloading things off steam or torrents. Also, if I'm watching things on youtube sometimes as well. To me it seems like my SSD is faulty, but I dont really know how to check.

 

I presume that is the Sandisk U100.

Is IntelliMemory installed?

How is the RAM usage?

IntelliMemory + the U100 isn't a good combination as it increases the likelihood of virtual memory usage and the small cache on the U100 means it can't smoothly handle concurrent writing and reading. So uninstall intelliMemory.

If my above theory isn't correct then how much spare space is on the SSD? If it is getting very full then do a good clean-up using a program such as ccleaner.

John

 

Yes, I do have the sandisk U100.

I believe I uninstalled intellimemory because it was causing my RAM to spike, I also searched for it just to be sure and I couldn't find it.

Ram usage is fine, right around 50% if I'm multitasking, or have a lot of windows open, so it seems normal.

At the current time, I have 15.5gb of free space. But I noticed this issue occur even when I had more free space.

And just to clarify another point, even when I'm downloading something off steam and it happens (which is like 90% of the time), its still the system that is using a majority of the % of the disk. Sometimes it occurs when as little as .1 mb/s are being written.

 

Thanks. That has sunk my initial theory so I'll have to try some other ideas.

What is the CPU usage when these slow-downs occur?

Are you using a wired or wireless internet connection. There have been so many issues with the Intel 6235 WiFi driver that I wouldn't be surprised if you are encountering a side-effect of one of them.

And have you thoroughly checked for any possible nasties that might have got onto your computer and might also be competing for your internet connection. In addition to doing a good anti-virus scan also run another scanner such as Spybot S&D.

We have to eliminate the other possibilities before homing in on the SSD. After the above the next step will be to back up your current Windows installation and reload the factory installation to see if you can replicate the problem there. That's a hurdle that Samsung support will expect you to jump over so you might as well do it before contacting them.

John

 

CPU never spikes, so I don't think thats the issue.

I use wifi normally. I will test to see if I experience the same slow downs when its wired. I will say this, the disk spikes normally occur when the network is being used. I'm also going to try transferring files back and forth from an external to see if that effects it at all.

I'll try spybot and Malwarebytes as well to be sure although I don't believe thats the issue.

And if I can't narrow it down I'll try reformatting, although I really hope I can avoid that.

 

Your mention of network also has me wondering about other software that may be doing periodic scans of the network. Anything that hogs the network connection while you are downloading something will cause an apparent disk slowdown.

John

 

I don't believe I have any 3rd party software running that would continuously scan my network. If you have any suggested software I should lookout for I would appreciate it.

I didn't get a chance to run all of the tests I mentioned in my last post, but what I did do is open up resource monitor to see what in system was writing the most to my disk, and presumably causing my disk to go up to 100% for no reason, and it looks like the culprit is pagefile.sys. It is writing waaaay more data than any of my other system processes. I'm actually not very familiar with what that is or why it would be using so much of my disk constantly though.

 

The page file is the virtual memory which is used as an extension of the RAM. If the RAM starts getting too full then Windows automatically dumps some of the content to the page file. With the U100's poor write performance this slows down the computer.

You can try changing the setting for the virtual memory. I always used a fixed size. If you have 4GB RAM then another 4GB for the page file should be plenty.

John

 

Ok, I will look up a guide to fix the page file size to a set amount.

It really baffles me that Samsung decided to go with the sandisk ssd in this model. It seems to be the only thing that causes issues with it. I hope the new ativ models went back to using samsung ssds.

 

One workaround to the problem is to install a different SSD. Most of us welcome the extra capacity as discussed in http://forum.notebookreview.com/samsung/672173-series-9-owners-third-party-msata-upgrades.html.

The supply of the U100s fortunately seems to dried up. My Book 9 Lite came with a 128GB Samsung mSATA SSD. If one looks only at the sequential read and write speeds then it is worse than the U100 but it doesn't have any of the U100's issues.

John

 

I still have a valid microsoft assure warranty for the next year. Will updating the ssd void my warranty?

 

If you ask Samsung they will say that opening the computer voids the warranty. However, there are no seals and it's not difficult provided you have a good quality Philips size 0 screwdriver for the screws on the bottom.

Don't cause any damage while doing the swap and keep the old SSD to put back in should you need warranty service. Several of us have done that without any problems (I had to send in my X3B for a battery replacement).

John

 

I managed to catch when my ssd starts lagging. Its because of the beta or alpha version of utorrent. If you use normal version everything goes smoothly. Try ti play more with the versions of utorrent or other torrent program.