[SOLVED] HDD usage sits at 100% with barely any data transfer taking place ?

Mar 18, 2021
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Solutions tested:
wpr -cancel: 'Error, there are no trace profiles running'
stopping DiagTrack

This can be triggered by launching an application, on start-up and sometimes randomly. It happens every time when I'm downloading or updating a game and during that time my computer is too slow to do anything else. But updating a game, "Valorant" is particularly painful when because of this problem the updater sits at 0.1KB/s speed despite a perfect connection and what should take 10mins to update takes about an hour. Steam and google drive are two other applications that are extremely slow and sluggish and google drive sometimes processes thousands of items which despite not transferring much data makes the laptop slower.


Troubleshooting:
During that hour I'm closing different disk using applications from task manager. And pray that the problem goes away. Sometimes it does, other times it goes when it wants.
Almost all of the disk hogging tasks during this time are system processes such as "system" and "antimalware service executable". They never utilize the disk this consistently except for when this problem happens.

One peculiarity is that despite my HDD having data transfer capacity of over 100MB/s during most times in this problem the sum total of data transfer taking place is about 3MB/s. How is that even possible, I wanna check if some software issue is underclocking the RPM of my HDD in the double digits so that this is happening or if its just a misreporting my the task manager. How can I check that? Where can I get more detailed statistics of what my HDD is doing during this time.

Sometimes the PC becomes unbearably slow, other times it just hangs until a hard reset or it completely stops a game from launching.

Problem stays even on windows 11, my laptop is expensive should I consider trying another HDD since my laptop doesn't have an SSD slot.

A friend of mine who has a laptop with ST1000LM049 HDD also I observed facing similar problem with sluggish laptop performance and 100% disk usage without any data transfer, and he also had the same problems with Valorant.

Specs:
IdeaPad L340
Toshiba MQ04ABF100
i5-8265U @1.60GHz
GeForce MX110
 
Upgrade to SSD (replace HDD with it).

lv-860-evo-sata-3-2-5-inch-ssd-mz-76e500b-eu-dynamicblack-89128920
 
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