100% disk usage (out of ideas)

[Ben321]

I’ve been having problems with disk usage being at 100% for the drive my OS is on for a few months now. Usually, as soon as I boot up my PC the disk usage will jump to 100% and stay that way for the majority of the time my PC is on, rendering it pretty un-usable. Occasionally it will resolve itself and go down to normal usage, and other times it will jump all over the place, going from 0% to 100% and then dropping back down to 0%. I don’t remember doing anything drastic before this started happening. I upgraded from Windows 7 to Windows 10 and everything was fine for months, this seems to have happened all of a sudden, randomly.

After trying pretty much everything suggested from various sources online and not being able to resolve the problem, my hard drive finally died. I figured buying a new hard drive and doing a fresh install of windows would finally resolve the problem. However, I recently bought a Samsung Evo 850 SSD, installed windows, but the problem still persists.

I’m also receiving blue screen crashes, which happened after about an hour after the fresh install of windows. I’m unsure if this is related to the 100% disk usage problem though.

I’m pretty much out of ideas as I’ve already tried disabling superfetch, windows search, playing around with the power settings, virtual memory, new hard drive, new RAM, fresh windows install, new sata cables, trying different sata ports, updating drivers, SFC scan, virus scan, etc.

I don't have a windows 10 disk as I upgraded from windows 7, so I had to use windows tools to put windows 10 on a USB from my old hard drive and did a fresh install on the new SSD I bought. Could this have taken over a corrupt version of windows 10? Any help would be appreciated, as I'm pretty much out of ideas.

Specs below. My PC is about 6 years old now.

Windows 10

MSI 770-C45

Amd phenom ii x4 925

4GB Ram

Sapphire Radeon HD 5770

2 TB internal HD (Used for storage)

1TB Internal HD (Used for the OS. This is the drive that has just died and was replaced with a SSD)

750W Power Supply

 

[LucoTF]

Well youve tried all the most common fixes... I had this issue and for me it was virtual memory - setting a manual page file size solved it for me.

Have you also disabled windows defender? Turned off all windows10 notifications?

 

[Ben321]

Thanks for the reply. Yea, I've tried disabling windows defender, as well as uninstalling avast and malwarebytes on my old hard drive. Also tried turning off windows notifications and messing about with automatic update settings. I'm pretty much out of things to try as I now have a completely fresh windows 10 install on a new SSD. But after putting in a new hard drive and ram, I'm unsure as to what else it could be.

 

[cherry blossoms]

Ben, go into your win 10 xbox app and turn off Game DVR. Make sure live tiles are disabled, and turn off the hibernation filesystem. Are you running any 3rd part apps? Did you disable PREfetch? (have to go into the registry as well for this one) Also disabling indexing.

Also, get Autoruns to really see what is being started up.

 

[Ben321]

Thanks for the suggestions. Unfortunately none of them have have worked for me. I'll give autoruns a go when I'm on my PC next.

Now that I have hardly anything installed I've been able to get a better look at the disk read/write and the main culprits, among others, appears to be NTFS volume log, NTFS master file table, and a large number of entries for C: Windows/software distribution.

I tried stopping Windows update from services, but was unable to, and also tried deleting the software distribution file, again I was unable to due to the folder being in use.

Any suggestions on following up on these leads?

 

[cherry blossoms]

A program like W10Privacy would help you turn off many of the telemetry options that may be causing that logging behavior. It was another useful step h to reduce the constant disk activity I was experiencing here. Also helpful to turn off services that may be logging.

Your driver packages may install telemetry items as well that will need disabled. Also encountered that problem here.

 

[LucoTF]

So I just had this problem appear on my laptop. The cause this time was MSI mode as per this article:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/3083595/task-manager-might-show-100-disk-utilization-on-windows-10-devices-with-message-signaled-interrupt-msi-mode-enabled

After I disabled it for the AHCI controller and rebooted the problem went away