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Forum Discussion
Too high disk activity
While I'm using my computer normally without touching anything Dropbox related, the Dropbox process (I have a system monitor installed that shows disk usage and which process is using it the most among other things) randomly and strangely frequently uses large amounts of my HDD's processing capacity to a point where it causes stuttering in video playback, video games, and other applications that have higher priority for my computer use. This was also verified by simply shutting down Dropbox, since the problem goes away with that.
Since I'm the only user of this account as well, I'm the only one causing changes to it, so there's no new files being received or files being modified which are pushed to me to cause any of this either.
Also, I don't have an anti-virus installed that performs real-time scanning on reads/writes to interfere with this.
I presume this is Dropbox scanning the folders for changes, but I don't think it should cause this much disk activity or at least not such huge spikes for it. And I'm fairly sure the OS has file system notification API (change notifications, like Linux has inotify) that would remove the need to scan the file system for changes in such old fashioned and resource intense manner.
This sounds like EXACTLY my problem!
Same here - Dropbox is killing me with extremely high disk usage
This happens to me, causing 100% disk usage, even though it is not really doing anything. When I end task dropbox, the problem goes away.
Dropbox disk usage gets 100% quite often. Have to shut it down when I want to get work done otherwise it slows down everything.
I have this problem too on Win 10. It makes things really rather slow. I'd really like to have Dropbox just running in the background so that there's no hassle, but that is difficult now
Since installing Windows 10 I'm having issues with Dropbox and 100% disk usage too.
Whenever I close Dropbox, the issue is gone.
Is anyone at Dropbox doing anything about this??
I am a paid user.
100% disk as I download 200,000 files at a very high speed connection 70 mgpsec download
3 days at 100% and still no where close when I normally expect it to take 8 hours.
have to shut down dropbox to get any work done
second highest are system and compressed memory
time control library
As far as I can tell, they just ignore these. I still have the problem I originally reported, hence why I keep Dropbox off from autostart and only briefly launch it to sync my files. Been looking for alternatives (really should give Google Drive another try or something), but I haven't had a pressing need for one, so I've stuck around only because of that.
When I transferred dropbox folder from my primary (small capacity) SSD to a secondary large HDD (WDC WD500AAKX-001CA0) the disk started to suffer of high disk usage. It is always in 100% disk usage. Also all processes in my PC slowed down. I cannot use my pc while dropbox is in sync mode. I have to pause synchronization to work with other programs. Is there any way to reduce the disk usage?
*Update. There was a file in the dropbox folder that was "unreadable". I removed it and now the disk is working normally.hey could u plz tell me what file that was unreadable? my problem started two weeks ago (100% disk usage). since then i formatted my computer twice, downgraded to windows 8 and replaced my 1 tera hard drive with a 250 gb ssd (!). only to realize it was dropbox sync process that was the problem all along.
- Sanchez
Dropbox Staff
Hi,
Thanks for posting in our forum!
How did you find it was an "unreadable" file causing the problem?
The first post on this issue is back in 2015. Does anyone at Dropbox respond to these questions? This really slows down my computer.
