Hard Drive constantly running at 100%

[pcbuilder956]

Hey everyone, recently my hard drive has been constantly running at 100% while I am just at the home screen. Task manager shows that "system and compressed memory" is what is running so high. The problem will last about 15 minutes, remain ok for less than 5 minutes, and then continue on. As you can imagine while this is happening everything I try to do on the PC is extremely slow because of this. I have run multiple antiviruses to see if it was possibly a virus but have had no luck. I am running Windows 10 if that helps. Any ideas would be great. Thanks!

 

[Boogieman_WD]

Hey there.

If it's not a virus it could be some sort of issue with the drive, or a different kind of software problem, perhaps an OS one. First, you should backup your important data if you haven't done it already, just to be on the safe side. After that I'd advise you to download the HDD manufacturer's diagnostic tool and run the tests so that you can either confirm or rule out a possible issue with the HDD. You could also give it a go with a different SATA port and different cables, to see if the same thing happens.
Check if you have available updates for your OS and give it a go, to see if that fixes things up. You could also try disabling some OS services, which have been linked to high disk usage sometimes, services like: BITS (Background Intelligent Transfer Service), Superfetch, Prefetch and Windows search, just to see if any of them is the cause for the problem.

Hope that helps. Please let me know how it goes.
Boogieman_WD

 

[BadAsAl]

Run CrystalDiskInfo to see if it reports any issues.
Boot in safe mode and see if it helps. If it does then you can be fairly certain there is a process or service running that is causing this.