Question Hard Drive disk 100% constantly while playing games

culann15

Prominent
Jun 21, 2018
9
0
510
Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-8750H CPU @ 2.20GHz
8Gb of Memory
1TB Hard Drive and 128GB SSD
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 with Max-Q Design

I have been playing The Witcher 3 for a couple days perfectly fine, until one day i tried playing and i noticed lag spikes coming from my hard drive. Usually when this happend i just restart my pc, but nothing i do helps. I know that i was clearing space to download Battlefield 4 and on the Disk Cleanup program i selected clear system files, and my computer flickered and my witcher game i had pulled up was all purple. I also installed a firmware update right after that, so i dont know what started the issue and how i could reverse the problem. I have tested it for damages and it says its fine.
 
Last edited:

Nikhilsj33

Honorable
Mar 22, 2015
29
1
10,545
Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-8750H CPU @ 2.20GHz
8Gb of Memory
1TB Hard Drive and 128GB SSD
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 with Max-Q Design

I have been playing The Witcher 3 for a couple days perfectly fine, until one day i tried playing and i noticed lag spikes coming from my hard drive. Usually when this happend i just restart my pc, but nothing i do helps. I know that i was clearing space to download Battlefield 4 and on the Disk Cleanup program i selected clear system files, and my computer flickered and my witcher game i had pulled up was all purple. I also installed a firmware update right after that, so i dont know what started the issue and how i could reverse the problem. I have tested it for damages and it says its fine.
Can you open task manager and check which program is using your Disk?
 

culann15

Prominent
Jun 21, 2018
9
0
510
That is why the disk is constantly running...you don't have enough memory for gaming so Windows is using the hard drive to make up for it. 16gig is recommended as the minimum for gaming today for just this reason.
I was able to play my games just fine before. Is there any fix to this?
 
How much free space is left on the SSD ? Windows is definitely using it as a swap drive to make up for low ram...if the SSD has less than 10% free space you'll start running into issues. If the SSD is low on space I would move the Windows swap drive to the 1T drive.

The other thing you can try is to run display driver uninstaller and do a clean install for your video driver. I would also install the latest motherboard chipset driver just in case something got unintentionally uninstalled when you were clearing disk space.
 
Jan 9, 2019
58
2
45
Windows will not use 100% of the ram because it will crash. It will get to about 95% and then it will start using the hard drive as memory. SSD or not, the local Hard Drive memory swap is slow! It will causue all kinds of lag issues.
 

culann15

Prominent
Jun 21, 2018
9
0
510
Windows will not use 100% of the ram because it will crash. It will get to about 95% and then it will start using the hard drive as memory. SSD or not, the local Hard Drive memory swap is slow! It will causue all kinds of lag issues.
So do you think upgrading to 16 GB of memory would solve this issue?