OneDrive high disk usage

PilgrimLyieu · Sep 7, 2023

Hello everyone, I found that OneDrive often occupies a lot of disk IO when it is turned on, causing the computer to lag, so I posted to ask for help from everyone to find its cause and explore solutions.

As shown in the figure below, OneDrive occupies a reading speed of up to 400MB/s, which causes other applications to open slowly and lag, which has caused great inconvenience to my normal work and life.

However, as shown in the figure below, OneDrive shows "Files have been synchronized", so I don't understand why it needs to read my disk at such a high speed (by the way, it seems to only read my C drive and D drive, not Read my mobile hard drive).

During this period of time, I was deeply troubled by it. As shown in the figure below, it has read up to 72T of data, and my hard drive (partitioned into C drive and D drive) has only 512G of space, which means it has read my hard drive more than 140 times. How terrible!

In order to help you better help me solve the problem, I will try my best to extract the information that I think is related to this:
The following is my OneDrive settings:

Because the setting interface is in Chinese, I translated it into English through machine translation, hoping that it will not affect understanding.

Preferences: "Start OneDrive when I log in to Windows", "Pause sync when this device is in power saving mode" and "Pause sync when this device is using a metered network" are all enabled.

Advanced settings: "Limit download speed" and "Limit upload speed" are both off.

Notifications: "Notify me when sync is paused" and "Notify me when files are loaded from other accounts to this computer" are both on, and "Notify me before multiple files deleted on my computer are deleted from the cloud" is off.

Then there is information about the resources I store. My OneDrive is the education version of OneDrive, which means I have 1T of space. I have used 700+G of space. However, because I have "release space" most of the information and only save it in the cloud, I only occupy 800+M locally.

There are about 630G of audiovisual resources, all of which are only kept in the cloud, which is the part that occupies more space. The rest are some materials. It is also worth mentioning that I also used `mklink /D` to create some folder links, linking the folders of other hard drives to the OneDrive folder, but these do not take up much space.

I have tried searching the search engine, but maybe because I am not clear enough, or because I am using the wrong keywords, I did not find useful information. If someone can help me solve this problem, I will be very grateful.

PilgrimLyieu · Sep 7, 2023

In addition, OneDrive's reading is "periodic" (I hope I didn't describe it wrong), that is to say, it will read a lot of data in a period of time, and then stop for a period of time, and then read a lot of data, so on. I don't know if this will help solve the problem, but I think this is a phenomenon worth noting. In order to delay this problem, I have paused the automatic startup of OneDrive, but I think this is not a long-term solution.

Dru2 · Sep 7, 2023

I'd only be concerned if it was that high all the time. I've seen many apps spike high usage every now and then.

And yes, I use OneDrive and it's never consistently high like that unless syncing.

PilgrimLyieu · Sep 8, 2023

Dru2 said:
I'd only be concerned if it was that high all the time. I've seen many apps spike high usage every now and then.

And yes, I use OneDrive and it's never consistently high like that unless syncing.

My answer is "YES". It's high even everything has been synchronized. Except for it'll have a rest for seconds and be high again, maybe periodic.

Dru2 · Sep 8, 2023

antspants · Sep 8, 2023

PilgrimLyieu said:
In addition, OneDrive's reading is "periodic" (I hope I didn't describe it wrong), that is to say, it will read a lot of data in a period of time, and then stop for a period of time, and then read a lot of data, so on.

Seems to me that it's running the way it’s supposed to. Have you known it to run differently?

In order to delay this problem, I have paused the automatic startup of OneDrive, but I think this is not a long-term solution.

Sounds like “the solution”
Just another reason why many people choose to remove Onedrive.

PilgrimLyieu · Sep 8, 2023

antspants said:
Seems to me that it's running the way it’s supposed to. Have you known it to run differently?

Sounds like “the solution”
Just another reason why many people choose to remove Onedrive.

I'm just curious why OneDrive occupies a very high disk utilization in idle state, and I want to find a way to reduce its occupancy so that I can use my computer normally. I used to uninstall OneDrive directly, but now I can't give up the 1T space of the education version, so I hope to find a solution.

antspants · Sep 8, 2023

PilgrimLyieu said:
I'm just curious why OneDrive occupies a very high disk utilization in idle state

Probably poor architecture. But I appreciate what you’re saying. If it’s free it’s free, at least until you’re no longer a student.
Is it having trouble reading files do you think? Are your files on your main drive or have you moved the default folder locations to another drive?

PilgrimLyieu · Sep 8, 2023

antspants said:
Probably poor architecture. But I appreciate what you’re saying. If it’s free it’s free, at least until you’re no longer a student.
Is it having trouble reading files do you think? Are your files on your main drive or have you moved the default folder locations to another drive?

My OneDrive directory, most of the software and materials are on the D drive (some on the C drive), and I have encountered obvious lag when opening software, materials, etc. If you ask me if there is any trouble reading files, then my answer should be "indeed". In addition, I am also very worried that the high reading volume of OneDrive will affect the life of the SSD of my C drive and D drive.

antspants · Sep 8, 2023

PilgrimLyieu said:
My OneDrive directory, most of the software and materials are on the D drive (some on the C drive), and I have encountered obvious lag when opening software, materials, etc. If you ask me if there is any trouble reading files, then my answer should be "indeed". In addition, I am also very worried that the high reading volume of OneDrive will affect the life of the SSD of my C drive and D drive.

This is one reason why I ensure that any (one way) real time synced files I have, are synced to HDD. Read from the SSD, write to the HDD
But regardless, it may be the reason for the high recourses?

Edit;
You say high reading volume, reading is just reading, surely that has no impact? I’m unaware of this if it does have an impact. News to me.

PilgrimLyieu · Sep 8, 2023

antspants said:
This is one reason why I ensure that any (one way) real time synced files I have, are synced to HDD. Read from the SSD, write to the HDD
But regardless, it may be the reason for the high recourses?

Edit;
You say high reading volume, reading is just reading, surely that has no impact? I’m unaware of this if it does have an impact. News to me.

Thanks, I've learned that reading has no impact on the life of SSD. By the ways, is there any way to restrict the disk usage of OneDrive(Maybe limit the maximum disk reading rate to a proper number, like 50MB/s)?

antspants · Sep 8, 2023

PilgrimLyieu said:
Thanks, I've learned that reading has no impact on the life of SSD. By the ways, is there any way to restrict the disk usage of OneDrive(Maybe limit the maximum disk reading rate to a proper number, like 50MB/s)?

That’s a question for somebody else my friend. I know very little about anything.

Fabler2 · Sep 8, 2023

I don't use OneDrive but have a look Here

PilgrimLyieu · Sep 8, 2023

antspants said:
That’s a question for somebody else my friend. I know very little about anything.

OK. Thanks for your reply any way.

PilgrimLyieu · Sep 8, 2023

Fabler2 said:
I don't use OneDrive but have a look Here

Thanks and I've searched some solutions like the solution in the post you gave. However it doesn't work. Besides, my OneDrive could sync properly and it just takes high disk usage even everything has been synchronized.

pparks1 · Sep 8, 2023

I'm a Onedrive user, and I cannot say that I have ever noticed Onedrive using a high amount of disk in task manager. Now, it's possible that it does it from time to time, but since I haven't been looking, I haven't seen it. Also that means that I have never experienced a problem with my computer making me suspect a performance problem.

In your case, you have an NVMe drive, so 400MB/sec while a fair amount of traffic is only a fraction of what your drive is capable of. I wouldn't expect that to make a subtantial impact on the speed of you opening up other applications.

And your 72TB read number is not just from Onedrive, it's from everything your computer does. Booting your OS consumes read cycles, etc.

PilgrimLyieu · Sep 8, 2023

pparks1 said:
I'm a Onedrive user, and I cannot say that I have ever noticed Onedrive using a high amount of disk in task manager. Now, it's possible that it does it from time to time, but since I haven't been looking, I haven't seen it. Also that means that I have never experienced a problem with my computer making me suspect a performance problem.

In your case, you have an NVMe drive, so 400MB/sec while a fair amount of traffic is only a fraction of what your drive is capable of. I wouldn't expect that to make a subtantial impact on the speed of you opening up other applications.

And your 72TB read number is not just from Onedrive, it's from everything your computer does. Booting your OS consumes read cycles, etc.

I use TrafficMonitor to detect the disk utilization of my main SSD (that is, my C drive and D drive). This value is stable at a relatively small value when OneDrive is not enabled, but once OneDrive is enabled, this value will soar to a high value; similarly, when I haven’t opened OneDrive, I can open software and files steadily and quickly, but once I open OneDrive, I will encounter obvious lag. Therefore, I think this is related to OneDrive. In addition, you mentioned that "my 72TB reading number is not only from OneDrive", yes, that's right. But I believe that most (I think more than 50%) is caused by OneDrive, because except for Windows updates, I have not seen any program that occupies such a high disk utilization (even when Windows updates, the highest disk utilization is not as high as OneDrive).