Question 100% Disk Usage on Low Read/Write Rates

[Candidium]

Good afternoon,

My specs (both old and new) are as follows:

• Seagate ST3500312CS SATA 3.0, 500GB (2 years old, barely used)
• ASRock 970DE3/U3S3 SATA 3.0 (6 years old)
• AMD 6300FX 3.5GHz 6-core CPU (6 years old)
• NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650, 4GB (2 months old)
• HyperX DDR3 8GB PC3-12800 CL10 single RAM stick (~ 1 year old)

I installed this new hard drive 2 years ago, put Windows 7 on it, and in the last few months updated to Windows 10. I can't remember whether the disk usage was high before installing Win 10 as I don't use this computer much and generally assumed any slowness was due to the old hardware. When I log into Windows the computer is slow at the most elementary of tasks, such as opening folders, for a few minutes, then it's quite smooth.

I have some screenshots of processes using lots of "disk":

https://imgur.com/iR03AoM

View: https://imgur.com/iR03AoM
,

https://imgur.com/0zrm8Qd

View: https://imgur.com/0zrm8Qd
,

https://imgur.com/4weDhxl

View: https://imgur.com/4weDhxl
.

This HD has two partitions for a dual boot into Windows / Linux. I mainly use Windows. The HD is plugged into a SATA 3 port on the motherboard.

So far, I have defragmented an only 4% fragmented drive, used SeaTools to scan / correct errors, and used chkdsk.exe to check for and fix problems, all returning 0 errors and no fixes. The biggest resource hog I own is Kaspersky Internet Security, and very few non-Microsoft startup programs.

I do wonder whether having two RAM sticks instead of one would help, but I can't imagine the dual channel benefit would increase the speed more than double what I currently have, which would still be slow. I happen to have 2 spare 4GB RAM sticks lying around from Corsair if you say I should do this.

Do I just have a terrible, cheap HDD that I should abandon at once or is there some sort of bottleneck I can remove to increase the disk read/write speed, which is quoted at 300 MB/s in the manual (with a sustained rate of 120 MB/s) but actually goes up to only 30 MB/s for big files and 2 MB/s for small files?

Thanks for your time, and hopefully answers!

 

[jeremyj_83]

That hard drive that you have is quite old. It is a 5900RPM disk with only 8MB of cache using SATA II interface. Basically it would have been a low end drive when it was release in the late 2000's and you are using it in a modern large OS. It will take a long time for that disk to get everything sent into RAM that needs to be expanded when the computer boots. Then when you want to do anything it will take a long time for it to load anything. If you want to have any disk performance, clone it onto a 500GB SSD. This one is a good choice and is a fair price https://www.amazon.com/dp/B073SBZ8YH?tag=pcpapi-20&linkCode=ogi&th=1&psc=1 You can then use the old slow HDD to store things like music that doesn't need any performance to work correctly.