Windows – Plugging the usb device makes PC go crazy

It's good you cleared out your start up items, but there is another way to start items with your PC - Next time you load up Windows successfully, go to your task scheduler - Look through and there is probably something starting up as your PC does (I had an Asus service trying to start and it caused error messages on each boot).

Also, it is possible it's a service which you don't want. Type services.msc into the search bar and see if you can find the failing service and disable or delay it.

Based on the new information you have provided, I can say that there is in fact no problem at all. Then why does it “go offline” for a few seconds for up to three minutes after suspending the guest OS? Because as you said, the HDD LED light stays lit while the drive remains unresponsive because it is being heavily used.

What is happening is that when you finish using VMWare and want to sleep the guest OS, you use the standby or hibernation feature instead of shutting down. This causes VMWare to copy the contents of the VM’s RAM to disk so that it can resume where it left off without having to boot up all over again. Depending on how much memory you have assigned to the VM and how much was being used, this can mean that VMWare has to write quite a lot of data (gigabytes) to disk.

When VMWare copies the memory to disk, the drive becomes more or less unresponsive to new disk operations until the current disk operations (writing the RAM to a file) have finished. As a result, when you open My Computer, Windows tries to refresh the data but it cannot read the drive to fetch the needed data because there’s all those write commands already in line waiting to happen. Therefore it leaves it empty and looking like it’s offline until it can manage to slip in those read requests (between VMWare’s write operations).

If you open the drive in Explorer, you will see that either it will not open it at all for a while, or it will open it and flash the address bar with a green progress bar like it does whenever there is a lengthy file operation (like searching for thousands of files).

In summary, there is nothing surprising or mysterious about this situation. If instead of putting a VMWare guest OS into standby, you had just manually copied a giant file to the drive, the results would be exactly the same.

So what can you do to fix it? Aside from changing to a faster drive (or using an internal one if D: is external), your best bet is to defragment the drive. If D: is very fragmented, then when VMWare tries to flush the RAM to disk, it will cause it to thrash around a lot while writing chunks of the giant file to different areas (of course this is assuming it’s not an SSD, which if D: is still a partition on the same 0ST320LT007 drive as C:, then it’s not).

If you defragment the drive (assuming that there is sufficient free space), then the system can write the RAM file with only a few file operations in large swaths (e.g., write 1GB of data at cluster X) instead of many, many little operations (write 1MB here, write 245.18MB there, 4KB here, another 18.1MB somewhere else…) Then sleeping the VM will finish much faster and the drive will be more responsive.

To find out exactly what the access is that is causing the drive to be active and busy, you can use a tool like Process Monitor. Run it and click the class-filters to select only the file-class filter as seen below.

Now you can see what files and folders are being accessed. Make sure to memorize the hotkey to start and stop activity capturing (Ctrl+E) so that you can stop it once it starts flooding with what is likely to be the disk operations from VMWare.