disk usage is capped at 50% since i installed a new hard drive.

[TheDentist26]

so a week ago my disk usage was capped at 100.. after a whole bunch of trouble shooting i decided to install a new hard drive thinking that my old one was starting to become faulty..

Now that i installed a new HDD it seems to be capped at 50% instead.. my plan was to move everything over to the new hard drive including my OS so that i could just boot from the new hdd..

the thing is i dont know.. can anyone diagnose the situation? was my old one faulty or is there some other problem?

 

[JaredDM]

It's totally normal to see disk usage at 100% a fair amount of the time, so unless you're seeing other system hangs, BSOD's, CRC errors, etc. I wouldn't worry about it.

As to why it's now showing 50%, that's a simple math equation.

old setup:
1Drive x Active 100% = 100%

new setup:
((1 drive x Active 100%) + (1 drive x Active 0%)) / 2 drives = 50% drive active time.


It's just averaging out the two drives and since one is idle it's never going past 50%.

 

[derekullo]

Open the resource monitor ( resmon.exe ) and go to the disk tab.

This will allow you to see what exactly is writing and or reading to and from that hard drive.

An idle hard drive stays at idle unless acted upon by you telling it to do something or Windows decides it wants to do something.
(Let's call that Derek's First Law of Hard Drive Activity)

The task scheduler has a defrag task which will heavily tax a hard drive .
(This should obviously be disabled if you have a solid state)

Windows Update likes to download.

The Windows Indexing Service likes to index when it sees nothing is using the hard drives.

The resource monitor will tell you exactly which one is taking up your hard drive's active time.