[SOLVED] 100% Disk Usage on boot and when opening applications

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Sep 6, 2020
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I recently built my PC about 2 weeks ago. Pretty much right from the start, I've had this 100% disk usage issue where the disk goes straight to 100% off the boot and eventually calms down but then when I try to open an application such as Discord or Spotify, it goes right back up to 100%. This drastically effects the load times as opening up discord can take around 10 minutes sometimes. This also causes tons of stutters on my desktop and one time the hdd seemed to completely crash and it was frozen for 20 seconds. I've followed all the tutorials that say to disable superfetch or disable another thing in windows and none of those have worked. I've also done a clean install of windows and drivers and that hasn't fixed anything. I even got a second drive and the same issues are occurring with it. The only thing I can think of that may be causing it is the data cable as I used the same one for both drives. I guess my question is Could the Data cable be causing this issue? And if not, is there anything else that may be causing this? Thanks so much for any help!! My system specs are:
CPU:ryzen 7 3700x
GPU: Rtx 2060 super
MOBO: Asrock Phantom Gaming 4 x570
Hdd: Seagate barracuda 2TB.
 
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Get SSD for your system. No modern pc should be without it.

You probably have SMR mechanical drive there. Those should not be used for OS drive.
For mass storage like movies/music collection they are fine.
It's not just SMR drives. For the last 3 or 4 major updates Windows 10 has been beating the cheese out of spinning drives (marked as "system"). Likely due to internal changes that favor SSD over spinners.
 
Sep 6, 2020
7
0
10
Get SSD for your system. No modern pc should be without it.

You probably have SMR mechanical drive there. Those should not be used for OS drive.
For mass storage like movies/music collection they are fine.
That's true I'm working on getting an ssd. I originally got an m.2 but it wasn't recognized by bios.
 

jasonf2

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If the 100% is holding for anything more than the boot cycle for just a little bit you have something wrong. In my experience it is either a drive, a cable or a sata controller. As everyone else has mentioned get a SSD and get rid of the rust drive for your primary OS partition for performance reasons. And honestly in today's day of cheap flash I would suggest getting rid of spin drives entirely. The issue isn't the bandwidth that every drive manufacturer loves to brag about it is the latency for data retrieval. The worst SSD will be hundreds if not thousands of times faster at retrieving random data across the drive than a spin drive and you actually "feel" the difference when you go SSD. There are very few perceivable upgrades in today's PC hardware game, getting rid of your spin drive on your os partition is one of them. If you have a M.2 slot go nvme and it will bypass the sata controller just in case it is bad.
 
Sep 6, 2020
7
0
10
If the 100% is holding for anything more than the boot cycle for just a little bit you have something wrong. In my experience it is either a drive, a cable or a sata controller. As everyone else has mentioned get a SSD and get rid of the rust drive for your primary OS partition for performance reasons. And honestly in today's day of cheap flash I would suggest getting rid of spin drives entirely. The issue isn't the bandwidth that every drive manufacturer loves to brag about it is the latency for data retrieval. The worst SSD will be hundreds if not thousands of times faster at retrieving random data across the drive than a spin drive and you actually "feel" the difference when you go SSD. There are very few perceivable upgrades in today's PC hardware game, getting rid of your spin drive on your os partition is one of them. If you have a M.2 slot go nvme and it will bypass the sata controller just in case it is bad.
Thanks so much for all the useful info! I believe I checked the sata controllers in windows and it said that the drivers were up to date. Could there still be issues with them? I think I'll have to order another data cable because the 2nd one that came with my Mobo doesn't have a right angle and it won't fit with the back panel of my case. I'll definitely take everyone's advice and I'm gonna save up for an nvme.
 
Sep 6, 2020
7
0
10
I recently built my PC about 2 weeks ago. Pretty much right from the start, I've had this 100% disk usage issue where the disk goes straight to 100% off the boot and eventually calms down but then when I try to open an application such as Discord or Spotify, it goes right back up to 100%. This drastically effects the load times as opening up discord can take around 10 minutes sometimes. This also causes tons of stutters on my desktop and one time the hdd seemed to completely crash and it was frozen for 20 seconds. I've followed all the tutorials that say to disable superfetch or disable another thing in windows and none of those have worked. I've also done a clean install of windows and drivers and that hasn't fixed anything. I even got a second drive and the same issues are occurring with it. The only thing I can think of that may be causing it is the data cable as I used the same one for both drives. I guess my question is Could the Data cable be causing this issue? And if not, is there anything else that may be causing this? Thanks so much for any help!! My system specs are:
CPU:ryzen 7 3700x
GPU: Rtx 2060 super
MOBO: Asrock Phantom Gaming 4 x570
Hdd: Seagate barracuda 2TB.
I'm not sure if this will show up to everyone but first off, I apologize for the wait. I've been very busy and the cable took a while to ship. I just switched out the data cables and I still get the same issue. The only other solution that you guys proposed was that I had an issue with my sata controllers. How would I go about fixing this?
 
How would I go about fixing this?
Get SSD. Nowadays that's basically the only way.

You have SMR drive there. Any write to the drive messes up neighboring tracks. They have to be overwritten as well. Windows writes to OS drive all the time. So you get endless writing cycle.

As mentioned before - SMR drives should be avoided to be used as OS drive.
 
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Sep 6, 2020
7
0
10
Get SSD. Nowadays that's basically the only way.

You have SMR drive there. Any write to the drive messes up neighboring tracks. They have to be overwritten as well. Windows writes to OS drive all the time. So you get endless writing cycle.

As mentioned before - SMR drives should be avoided to be used as OS drive.
Thanks for all the help! I understand that I need to re-install windows on an ssd but is this normal for even an SMR drive? Would it normally perform this horribly? I'm just wondering if there is any way to potentially fix it or make it a bit faster for the time being until I get an SSD. Thanks again for all the help!
 
I understand that I need to re-install windows on an ssd but is this normal for even an SMR drive?
If your next SSD has capacity large enough, then you can just clone all contents of HDD to SSD.
No reinstall necessary then.
Would it normally perform this horribly? I'm just wondering if there is any way to potentially fix it or make it a bit faster for the time being until I get an SSD.
SMR drives should not be used for anything other than archived data - backups, movie/music/image collections (write once/do not update type data).
 
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