Windows Vista Disk Thrashing
Nov 22nd, 2007 by Tim Skipper
I’ve been aware that my Sony VAIO TZ series laptop tends to thrash it’s hard drive a lot, even when it’s seemingly doing nothing. Since this has got to be adversely affecting the battery life – currently an excellent 6 hours in Power Save mode – I decided to investigate it further.
The resource monitor tool was showing me that Vista was hammering away at a file named C:\System Volume Information\{<guid style value>}
A bit of Googleing later revealed this to be the Volume Shadow Service (VSS). Basically it creates System Restore points at critical times (such as when installing programs or Windows Updates), but also runs on a scheduled basis.
If you’re good at keeping backups, then you can safely disable this feature and stop all the thrashing. Go to Computers -> Properties -> System Protection and un-check your drive(s).
It seems to have done the trick nicely.