HDD indicator light always on, HDD health is good

[k.norberg97]

Hi, maybe one of you could help me. I've run Avast full scans to check for viruses, I've run Malwarebytes to check for malware, I've run HDTune to check my HDD health, as well as check it's SMART and everything checks out. But, when I monitor my hard drive activity while I use my pc, it spikes when opening programs such as Spotify or Discord, or even some games. It becomes really sluggish and slow, and at times will completely lock up for several minutes, anywhere between 30 seconds to 10 minutes really. A few times, not often, when I've had to do a hard restart, as it attempts to boot Windows, it will run a disk check, though it doesn't ever find anything. I've run RAM performance tests through Windows utilities, to no avail. I've dusted my PC well, too.

I can not, for the life of me, figure out what is wrong with my PC. Could anyone lend me a hand please?

Here are my specs:
Gigabyte 970A-UD3P Motherboard
AMD FX-8350 Vishera 8-core 4.0GHz CPU
G.Skill Ripjaws Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1600 Memory
Western Digital - Caviar Blue 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM HDD (Primary - OS Partition)
Crucial BX200 240GB SSD (Chrome, Steam, some games)
Seagate 320GB HDD
WD 320GB HDD
MSI GeForce GTX 960 2GB GPU
Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO CPU Cooler
EVGA 500W 80+ Certified ATX Power Supply
Arctic Silver thermal paste I applied roughly 6-10 months ago


Thoughts?


Edit: Here are the SMART results. First screenshot is the top portion,
second is the bottom portion.

First:

Second:

The hard drive in question is the Caviar Blue WD 1TB one that lists as WDC WD10EZEX-00BN5A0 at 1000.2GB

Currently, the drive has 268 GB of 931 GB free.
At one point, several months ago, I ran WinDirStat to see what files were taking up a lot of space and I ended up removing a lot of stuff and had the drive down to about half capacity. Obviously, it's not at that point anymore, though.


What else should I post?

Alright so I have a Crucial SSD connect and here are the S.M.A.R.T. results for it
First:

Second:

Third:

I also have some laptop hard drives, the first is a Western Digital 320GB running 5400 RPM
First:

Second:

The other drive is a Seagate 320GB running 5400 RPM
First:

Second:

Third:

 

[popatim]

Post your smart results please.
Also let us know Which drive you are talking about and how full it is. Thanks.

 

[k.norberg97]

Post your smart results please.
Also let us know Which drive you are talking about and how full it is. Thanks.

I have updated the post to include screenshots of my SMART results and I've also detailed the drive I am using.

 

[popatim]

Your drive does indeed look very healthy.

Go ahead and run resource monitor (run resmon.exe) and watch the activity on the disk tab and see if anything starts grabbing alot of the disk when this happens

If there is nothing obviously using the drive in Resource monitor then I would schedule a checkdisk with both options checked on. Maybe its a corrupt file system.

When you are ready to run it: Rt click the drive in file manager/explorer. On the tools tab click Error Checking. Make sure both options are checked and continue. It will ask you if you want to run it at the next restart, say yes and then restart.

 

[k.norberg97]

Your drive does indeed look very healthy.

Go ahead and run resource monitor (run resmon.exe) and watch the activity on the disk tab and see if anything starts grabbing alot of the disk when this happens

If there is nothing obviously using the drive in Resource monitor then I would schedule a checkdisk with both options checked on. Maybe its a corrupt file system.

When you are ready to run it: Rt click the drive in file manager/explorer. On the tools tab click Error Checking. Make sure both options are checked and continue. It will ask you if you want to run it at the next restart, say yes and then restart.

I ran a checkdisk and restarted. My system restarted fairly quickly, said "volume is clean". I got no messages or results on startup. What should I do now?

 

[popatim]

Do you actually have other drives installed? D: E: or S: ?
One of those could be a contributor.

 

[k.norberg97]

Do you actually have other drives installed? D: E: or S: ?
One of those could be a contributor.

Yeah, I have 3 other drives installed. Should I run SMART on each of them too?

 

[popatim]

Yes please.

Or disconnected them and then power up and see if the symptoms are gone.

 

[k.norberg97]

Yes please.

Or disconnected them and then power up and see if the symptoms are gone.

I have not yet disconnected them, but I have posted the updates as far as all the SMART results go. They all SEEM healthy.

 

[popatim]

I would begin by disconnecting the seagate. It has a read error rate that is a bit high. Is it installed someplace where it might vibrate or is loud (noise can cause vibration as well)
It has no reallocated or uncorrectable sectors so it seems its just having a little trouble reading.