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Windows System Log · Event 153
Windows asked the disk for something, got no answer in time, and asked again. The retry usually succeeds, so nothing visibly breaks — but the machine froze for the seconds it took, and that is why this event turns up under every complaint about stuttering.
Also written as Event ID 153 diskdisk 153 warningio operation retried event viewer
Your drive took too long to answer and Windows tried again. If your PC freezes for a few seconds at a time — audio stutters, the mouse still moves but nothing responds — this is very often the reason. A handful over months is fine. Several a day means back up your files now and then work out why.
On physical hardware this is a drive, cable or backplane problem and it precedes outright failure often enough to be worth alerting on. On virtual machines it is usually the host: contended datastores and snapshot consolidation produce guest-side 153s with perfectly healthy virtual disks, so check host latency before touching the guest. Note that 153 replaced the older Event 129 pattern for retries handled by the storage driver rather than reset by the controller.
Sanitised. Addresses come from the RFC 5737 documentation ranges.
The IO operation at logical block address 0x1a2b3c4 for Disk 1 (PDO name: \Device\0000002c) was retried.Everything else in the log line is context.
Event 153 aloneThe driver retried and recovered. Least serious. 153 with 129The controller had to be reset as well. More serious and more likely to be hardware. 153 with 55Retries plus filesystem corruption. Act on this rather than monitoring it. Most of the time it is one of these.
What gives it awayA burst of 153s alongside heavy write activity and a sudden change in file extensions. The disk events are a side effect, not the detection.
ATT&CK T1486What gives it awaySustained retries correlating with a process holding high disk and CPU that nobody can account for.
ATT&CK T1496Get-WinEvent -FilterHashtable @{LogName='System'; Id=153} -MaxEvents 200 | Group-Object { $_.TimeCreated.Date } | Select-Object Name, CountGet-PhysicalDisk | Select-Object DeviceId, FriendlyName, MediaType, HealthStatus, OperationalStatusEvent | where EventLog == 'System' and EventID in (153, 129, 51) | summarize count() by EventID, Computer, bin(TimeGenerated, 1d) | order by Computer asc, TimeGenerated ascIt depends entirely on how often it happens. A few over several months, especially on a USB drive, are not worth acting on. Several a day, or a count that keeps rising, is one of the clearest warnings Windows gives that a drive is on its way out. Because it is cheap to check, count them before deciding.
Not by itself. The three common causes are a failing drive, a bad cable or connection, and a system too busy to service the disk in time. Changing the cable is the fastest test on a physical machine, and reading the drive's SMART data is the fastest way to confirm or clear the drive itself.
Because a retry takes real time — often several seconds — and everything waiting on that disk stops until it completes. Audio stutters, the mouse keeps moving but nothing responds, and then it all resumes. That pattern with 153s in the log is close to diagnostic of a storage problem rather than a CPU or memory one.
153 means the storage driver retried the operation and the system carried on. 129 means the controller had to be reset, which is a heavier failure affecting every device behind it. 153 alone is a warning; 153 with 129 alongside is a strong indication the hardware or the connection is genuinely faulty.
Almost certainly not. The guest sees the latency but the cause is nearly always on the host — a contended datastore, a snapshot being consolidated, or storage shared with a noisy neighbour. Check host-side latency first; replacing or rebuilding the virtual disk rarely changes anything.
Last reviewed 6 September 2026