HDD Usage at 100% when using After Effects & Sony Vegas

[Nervly]

Greetings, everyone!

Last month I got a new desktop, which HDD is a Western Caviar Blue of 1TB.
Everything works fine with it, except that while I use After Effects or render with Sony Vegas, the disk usage goes up to 100% in the task manager.

Here's a few things I've tried so far:
 - Disabled Superfetch & Windows Search
 - Disabled BITS
 - Ran chkdsk on Command Prompt

None of these seem to have worked, though again, the 100% usage only happens while using After Effects and while rendering with Sony Vegas (at 1080p60).

My specs are:
 - Intel i5-6500 Quad-Core 3.2GHz
 - Kingston HyperX Fury Black 8GB DDR4-2400MHz
 - MSI Z170 PRO GAMING CARBON 
 - MSI GTX 1060 Armor V1 3GB
 - Western Caviar Blue 1TB 7200RPM HDD

What do you think might be causing this? It's very annoying because while I use After Effects I can barely do anything else on my computer and when rendering with Sony Vegas, my computer goes unusable. It's bothering especially because I know for a fact that with these specs, the computer can multi task just fine. 

Thank you in advance,
 - Nervly

 

[leo2kp]

I think you might be running out of memory with only 8GB, and your pagefile is getting hit hard.

 

[Rookie_MIB]

What you're running into is a bottleneck because you only have a single HDD in your system. From what I can gather, your OS, program, and video data which is being processed is all on the same drive. The CPU is powerful enough to be able to process video fast enough to saturate a single SATA channel, but because all the data is flowing over a single cable (as in read video, process video, write video) it doesn't have enough bandwidth to be able to shuffle back and forth easily when the OS needs to access the data.

If you had an OS drive (ideally a 250GB SSD) and a dedicated HDD for processing video (the 1TB WD for example) then as the CPU was processing video and saturating the SATA channel to the HDD, the SATA channel for the SSD would be free for the OS to be able to access simultaneously.

Any time you make a video rig, you should always plan on an independent SSD for the OS, then a bulk HDD for the video storage and processing.

 

[Nervly]

What you're running into is a bottleneck because you only have a single HDD in your system. From what I can gather, your OS, program, and video data which is being processed is all on the same drive. The CPU is powerful enough to be able to process video fast enough to saturate a single SATA channel, but because all the data is flowing over a single cable (as in read video, process video, write video) it doesn't have enough bandwidth to be able to shuffle back and forth easily when the OS needs to access the data.

If you had an OS drive (ideally a 250GB SSD) and a dedicated HDD for processing video (the 1TB WD for example) then as the CPU was processing video and saturating the SATA channel to the HDD, the SATA channel for the SSD would be free for the OS to be able to access simultaneously.

Any time you make a video rig, you should always plan on an independent SSD for the OS, then a bulk HDD for the video storage and processing.

That does make a lot of sense. However, there's still one thing that's confusing me.
Before I had this computer, I used a laptop that is 8 years old at this point. It runs an old Pentium Dual-Core 2.1GHz with 4GB of RAM and naturally a much worse single HDD than my current desktop. I rendered dozens of videos with it both at 720 and 1080p as well, but it never got my disk usage up to 100%. Sure, it got very slow as well, but I could still use it. I could still switch windows, go on YouTube, etc., while in this case, my computer freezes for a few minutes and I can't do anything at all until the rendering is almost done. Surely, if my laptop still allowed me to multi task, even if barely, this computer should do even better? What's your take on this?

Thank you for your reply!

 

[Rookie_MIB]

Well, it does actually make a lot of sense. If you think about it:

Processing power between the old CPU and the new CPU has increased dramatically. I'm not sure which CPU you have, but browsing for a C2D @ 2.1 ghz means perhaps the T6500. Geekbench on that CPU is around 2000. Meanwhile, the average Geekbench on an i5-6500 is around 11,000. That means the CPU is around 5x faster, and if the software utilizes any of Intels hardware acceleration (Quick-sync etc) then it can chew through video faster than a fat kid eating M&Ms. Net result is your CPU is at least 400% faster than your laptop in pure processing speed/power.

Meanwhile, hard drive technology and speeds haven't kept pace (with regards to spinning drives - SSD's certainly have changed the game). Assuming your old HDD was SATA2 (SATA1 was released in 2003, SATA2 in mid-2004, SATA3 in 2009 - after your laptop was built), the max speed is 3Gbits, meanwhile your new desktop is SATA3 - max transfer speed of 6Gbits. However, your actual max speed is probably somewhere around 100-120MB/sec. Regardless, your old laptop drive might have been capable of 75MB/sec max speed, your new 7200 rpm is probably capable of 125 max speed or an increase of.... 60%

So - processing speed has increased 7 times relative to HDD speed which means you're trying to force firehose size amounts of data through a garden hose, and while your old laptop CPU couldn't process video fast enough to saturate the SATA drive, your desktop class CPU certainly CAN, and the HDD technology hasn't kept up.

Thus - the SATA drive is simply saturated with data while you're processing video, leaving no bandwidth for other tasks like the base OS or running other software which requires disk access.