Disk Usage is always at 96%-100%?

[Justinsanity]

My HDD is a 931GB Seagate ST31000340NS, and I am in Windows 10 64 bit

Basically I noticed everything on my computer is extremely slow when loading or other hard drive related tasks. I'm not sure what caused this exactly but it has started happening somewhat recently. I checked the disk usage and it is almost always at 96%-100%. Sometimes it'll drop down to 88% but that still isn't preferred. I researched online and tried disabling certain Windows services like Windows Search, BITS, and Superfetch and nothing fixed it. Any ideas?

 

[corroded]

yup... move to a SSD for boot

 

[Justinsanity]

yup... move to a SSD for boot

Along with everything else I disabled Windows Update and restarted. That seemed to fix it, everything's a lot faster now.

 

[LucoTF]

But you need windows update!

Unfortunately this is quite common with Windows 10, I've had it on both my desktop and laptop now and it comes up here on toms fairly regular. Common fixes:

- Disable windows search & superfetch
- Set manual pagefile size (this fixed it for my desktop)
- SSD ONLY - disable MSI on the AHCI controller (fixed my laptop)
- Turn off windows defender and/or antivirus
- Disable all windows notifications
- Disable chrome exentions
- Uninstall firefox

 

[Justinsanity]

Yeah I might re enable it later. I think I just had to restart my PC to see the changes. I'm going to mark this as the solution because I think this will help almost everyone with this problem.

But you need windows update!

Unfortunately this is quite common with Windows 10, I've had it on both my desktop and laptop now and it comes up here on toms fairly regular. Common fixes:

- Disable windows search & superfetch
- Set manual pagefile size (this fixed it for my desktop)
- SSD ONLY - disable MSI on the AHCI controller (fixed my laptop)
- Turn off windows defender and/or antivirus
- Disable all windows notifications
- Disable chrome exentions
- Uninstall firefox

 

[corroded]

The biggest issue is the way the HDD is tied up upon startup, this actually started w/ Vista. With Vista, the initial boot had a long lag because of these startup reference checks that ti up the HDD causing a perfectly good system to seem to be restricted. Disabling system processes only masks the issue and causes trouble later too. The checks should be deferred to not cause impact on performance. Unfortunately, this is not the way the OS is designed and the easiest way to mitigate it is to use a decent SSD for the boot drive.

It does not help that Dell, HP, and such are putting crappy 5400 rpm HDD's in systems that should have an SSD for the boot drive.

So, again, I recommend (if and when you can) go to an SSD (256GB class) as boot and your large hdd (I have a 4TB now) for storage and user folders (Desktop, Documents, Downloads, Music... NOT the whole profile). I also have an SSD just for Games and a little one that is set just for a flexible page file, totally unneeded but I had the 64GB sitting there.