Question I have 100 Percent usage on one of my drives

[DomC128]

I have had a problem over the last week or so where the disk usage on one of my SSDs is at 100 percent. This makes it impossible to access any files or data on the drive while the drive is in this state, after boot the 100 usage generally lasts around 15 minutes before mysteriously acting normal like a fast SSD. It occasionally goes back into the 100 usage state. I have tried many things to fix this and it is becoming increasingly frustrating, I do not think that the SSD can be broken because it is only around 1 month old and has not had heavy usage. This drive is mainly used as a steam library for games and has no windows files/ is not a boot drive.

Any Ideas on how to rectify this would be great.

My full specs:

Ryzen 7 3700x

Aorus Elite X570 AM4 Motherboard

2x 8GB Corsair Vengeance Pro RGB RAM 3600Mhz

RTX 2070 Super 8GB Graphics Card

Cooler Master V850 80+ Gold PSU

Windows 10 Home 64 Bit 1909

4 Drives in total:

-Samsung 840 Evo 240GB SSD (Boot Drive)

-WD Green 3TB Hard Drive

-Seagate Barracuda 1TB Hard Drive

-WD Blue 500GB SSD (Drive that has 100 Usage)

 

[sizzling]

How full is the drive? Ideally the drive should be under 85% full.

 

[DomC128]

The drive is less than 20 percent full maybe around 80gb of 500gb

 

[Nemesia]

How full is your OS drive?

 

[sizzling]

I expect WD have a tool you can use to health check the SSD drive. I’d have a look on their support page

 

[DomC128]

Hi my OS drive has 179GB free of 232GB. None of my drives are more than 40% full. I am just checking WD and it says the drive is fine on their tool. I checked the disk yesterday on cmd and it said windows cannot find any problem. I will post a few screenshots of the 100 usage and WD tool. Also task manager does a strange thing where it dosent see all of my drives for about a minute, only two of them then the other two pop in and the WD SSD if on 100 usage. May be connected. Thanks for all the help.
Screenshots:

https://imgur.com/a/mbiQjjM

View: https://imgur.com/a/mbiQjjM

 

[sizzling]

An idea. What SATA port is the SSD connected to? Often when an NVMe Drive is used the motherboard instructions will say not to use 2 of the available SATA ports.

 

[DomC128]

I have no NVME drives, the sata arrangement is as follows:
0:Samsung 840 Evo 240GB SSD SATA
1: WD 3TB Green
2: WD 500GB Blue SSD SATA
3: Seagate Barracuda 1TB
4: DVD Drive (No sata Power Plugged in currently due to lack of sata power ports in PC)

 

[sizzling]

Ok I have run out of reasonable ideas. I don’t see why it would help but as it’s easy to tile our, have you tried a different SATA cable and socket?

 

[DomC128]

I will try to do that again later today, I have tried this before and also tried different sata power cables. I have also trired just booting the OS Drive with the faulty drive. Same results. Then I put the drive into another PC and it seemed to work fine. It has really puzzled me for while as it slows the PC down a lot for the 10 minutes after boot that it is on 100 usage. Could it be that I have three Hard drives connected to one SATA power to the PSU, I have ordered another cable (modular PSU) but it is not here yet. I would have thought there would have been enough current in those cables to supply three hard drives but I have no more ideas really.

 

[DomC128]

Ok I tried the PC in this setup
0: Samsung 840 Evo 240GB SSD SATA
1: WD 500GB Blue SSD SATA

Task manager showed one drive and then after about a minute I got the second drive at 100 usage.

https://imgur.com/a/8sSHfW3

View: https://imgur.com/a/8sSHfW3


Thanks everyone for you help, if anyone has any ideas Id love to fix this frustrating issue.

 

[DomC128]

I just reconnected the SATA cables and it seems like it may have been fixed, I am going to just see how it goes for a little while so I wouldn't like to close this thread just yet. Its strange as I really haven't changed anything at all. Quick question which may sound silly, I ran out of HDD bays so the WD Blue drive is sat on top of the HDD bay Stack with two velcro sticky pads, would this cause an issue at all or not? I wouldn't have thought that a 2W SSD would over heat or anything due to this but could it cause extra static around the ssd or anything. Just trying to think of what caused this so I can ensure it does not retuen.

 

[DomC128]

Unfortunately this problem is still occurring, any further advice?

 

[Colif]

Try this, go to here - https://www.microsoft.com/en-au/software-download/windows10 - and click upgrade now. Run the upgrade assistant and update win 10 to version 2004 (was released this week). One of its purported fixes is the 100% usage bug on hdd, so see if they actually did or not.

 

[DomC128]

Try this, go to here - https://www.microsoft.com/en-au/software-download/windows10 - and click upgrade now. Run the upgrade assistant and update win 10 to version 2004 (was released this week). One of its purported fixes is the 100% usage bug on hdd, so see if they actually did or not.

Hi there, I tried this method and the new task manager seemed as if it would work, the entire program sort of looks revamped and I was hopeful. However I still have the issue where some drives do not appear which seems related to this problem and the drive still hits 100 usage often which slows down my entire pc a lot when it happens.

 

[Colif]

Someone suggested this idea already, have you run this on drive? https://support.wdc.com/downloads.aspx?p=3
you may need this instead - ssd dashboard - https://support.wdc.com/downloads.aspx?p=279

 

[DomC128]

Someone suggested this idea already, have you run this on drive? https://support.wdc.com/downloads.aspx?p=3
you may need this instead - ssd dashboard - https://support.wdc.com/downloads.aspx?p=279

I have tried this and it says the drive has passed

 

[DomC128]

Hi guys, I ended up resetting my PC and it initially worked fine. I also swapped the drive onto another PC and saw no problems. I then reinstalled my programs that I had on my PC before and the problem has reappeared. I will send a screenshot of the programs i installed on my desktop.https://imgur.com/a/Fy5coij

 

[DomC128]

https://imgur.com/a/s4hGEvG

View: https://imgur.com/a/s4hGEvG

 

[Colif]

is it at 100% usage in safe mode?
go to settings/update & security/recovery
under advanced startup, click restart now button
this loads you into windows recovery at startup
choose troubleshoot
choose advanced
choose startup options
click the restart button
choose a safe mode (it doesn't matter which) by using number associated with it.
Pc will restart and load safe mode

is usage still 100%?
if not, it could mean problem is a driver

Do you have newest BIOS on motherboard?

 

[GrandSACHI]

I don't know if you looked at that, but when the disk is at 100% usage, open your task manager, on the "Processes" tab, click on the header of the "Disk" column to sort the process from highest to lowest usage and see which one is using up your disk time the most. Might give you clues about who's the culprit here.

However, the delay to show up the drive points toward a hardware issue... maybe motherboard. Anyhow, knowing if it is always the same process that use up your drive time might still give some clues.

 

[DomC128]

I don't know if you looked at that, but when the disk is at 100% usage, open your task manager, on the "Processes" tab, click on the header of the "Disk" column to sort the process from highest to lowest usage and see which one is using up your disk time the most. Might give you clues about who's the culprit here.

However, the delay to show up the drive points toward a hardware issue... maybe motherboard. Anyhow, knowing if it is always the same process that use up your drive time might still give some clues.

The issue is that ordering by disk seems to only look at the windows drive. There is no obvious process, I replaced the drive on warranty and I still have the same issue, never with any other drive and I have used different ports of the motherboard.

 

[DomC128]

The only thing running on this drive is steam and it may be steam causing this issue but i cant see a way to fix it, the other day it seemed to have triggered when i launched the steam launcher.

 

[GrandSACHI]

Yeah, could be steam, but could be something else and you need to figure out what is causing the disk to run at 100% for so long.
Open Resource Monitor (you can either type "resource monitor" in the search bar or start it from the link at the bottom of the Performance tab of the Task Manager).

In Resource monitor, go to the disk tab and expand the "Disk Activity" section. there you will see the processes and the files being read/written, including their location. If you sort by File, then all processes will be clustered by disk usage. So for example, if in your case the culprit is the "D" drive, you can spot the processes that are currently using the D drive, which should allow you to identify the process that is crippling your drive at the moment. Of course do that only when your problem is ongoing.

 

[DomC128]

The only thing on the drive is a steam library with around 2 games on it but this problem keeps ocurring, just did another BIOS update. Does anyone have any suggestions?