[SOLVED] Hard Drive Randomly Spikes And Gets Stuck At 100%

xMarkersHD

Honorable
Nov 26, 2015
21
0
10,510
For the last few months my (D: ) Hard Drive will randomly spike to 100% disk usage and sometimes stay that way for about 10 - 15 seconds.
This causes any games I play to freeze but I can Alt + Tab and still access everything else with no problem.
The problem will happen when Idle or under heavy load.

Is it time for a new HDD?

Any help is greatly appreciated!

OS: WIndows 10
GPU : PNY RTX 3070
CPU: Ryzen 7 5600x
RAM: Corsair 2x 8GB 3200hz
MOBO: AORUS B550 PRO AC
HDDs: 3x Seagate 2TB Barracuda 3.5" Hard Drive ST2000DMZ08
PSU: Corsair CX600M CXM Series 600W (About 7 years old, used just for gaming)
 
Solution
SeaTools does not honestly report the true state of the drive. For example, SeaTools can give the drive a passing grade even if it has developed thousands of bad sectors.

Instead I would use a tool such as CrystalDiskInfo. Look for reallocated, pending or uncorrectable sectors. Also look for command timeouts.

For a full surface scan I recommend Victoria for Windows, or HDDScan. These tools will identify any "slow" sectors, ie those that require excessive read retries.

Ralston18

Titan
Moderator
First comment:

Is all important data backed up? Not only on the D: drive but other drives as well. Anything you do may cause loss of data in whole or in part....

Second comment:

How full is the the hard drive ( D: - general health? Run Seagate's disk tools (SeaTools) to check the drive.

Third comment:

When you see disk usage spike are you able to determine (via Task Manager, Resource Monitor, or Process Explorer) what app, service, or process is accessing the drive?

All in all, I suspect that the PSU is a likely culprit. Being 7 years old and with heavy gaming use the PSU is likely at or nearing its' designed in EOL (End of Life).

May no longer up to fully powering the host system - especially with 3 HDD's.
 
Last edited:

xMarkersHD

Honorable
Nov 26, 2015
21
0
10,510
First comment:

Is all important data backed up? Not only on the D: drive but other drives as well. Anything you do may cause loss of data in whole or in part....

Second comment:

How full is the the hard drive ( D: - general health? Run Seagate's disk tools (SeaTools) to check the drive.

Third comment:

When you see disk usage spike are you able to determine (via Task Manager, Resource Monitor, or Process Explorer) what app, service, or process is accessing the drive?

All in all, I suspect that the PSU is a likely culprit. Being 7 years old and with heavy gaming use the PSU is likely at or nearing its' designed in EOL (End of Life).

May no longer up to fully powering the host system - especially with 3 HDD's.


As of today, my Hard Drive has 182GB out of 1.81TB available
SeaTools said the drive was ok

SearchApp.exe and SearchFilterHost.exe seem to be giving the Drive a hard time

But I suspect it may be the PSU giving up on me aswell as my boot drive also appears to be having the issue.
 
SeaTools does not honestly report the true state of the drive. For example, SeaTools can give the drive a passing grade even if it has developed thousands of bad sectors.

Instead I would use a tool such as CrystalDiskInfo. Look for reallocated, pending or uncorrectable sectors. Also look for command timeouts.

For a full surface scan I recommend Victoria for Windows, or HDDScan. These tools will identify any "slow" sectors, ie those that require excessive read retries.
 
Solution

Ralston18

Titan
Moderator
"SearchApp.exe and SearchFilterHost.exe seem to be giving the Drive a hard time "

Disable and try/test without the apps.

And with only 182 GB remaining that alone may be problematic.

Likewise try other tools as suggested by @fzabkar. Something else may turn up as well.

Be sure to backup. The drive is giving "warnings". Even if all is somehow well that can change quickly.

Backups should be a regular system event. You may not receive future warnings.

A sudden PSU failure (as in any power loss) can corrupt files and data. And the files may not be recoverable.