Question Intermittent Storage Latency

[Ruarc88]

I'm having a weird issue where my system is intermittently locking up any and all tasks that appear to be related to storage in some way. Basically, I'll run or close an application and either nothing will happen for up to 10 minutes and then it'll finally open/close or the window will appear and base items will load, however things like profile data/configs/caches/ etc will then take up to 10 minutes to register. Example, launching Steam games, World of Warships in particular, the game will launch as if there's no profile in existence and will ask for me to enter a new username. Happens when launching from Start menu shortcut or direct from Steam. Twitch launcher will open the window but fails to find any games/instances/etc for up to 10 minutes. Battle.net launcher will take up to 10 minutes to show the window or will go into not responding state when trying to close the window. Waiting causes them all to eventually work properly.

Whenever this happens, task manager shows around 5-15% CPU usage. Resource monitor shows around 2MB of disk usage max with a large number of read/writes happening to appdata by the System process (PID 4). Usually around 20-30 instances of system that are always using the most IO.

Any real-time/already running tasks are running normally. Video/audio streaming and playback/gaming/web browsing/file explorer/ anything already open works perfectly fine.

Specs:
Mobo: Asus RoG Maximus Hero VIII
CPU: i7 6700k (downclocked to 3.6GHz in BIOS)
RAM: 32GB (2x 16GB) 2666
GPU: eVGA GTX 1080Ti
System drive: Samsung 970 Evo 1TB
Storage drives: 3x WD Black 4TB (storage only, no applications installed on these)
OS: Windows 7 64-bit SP1

I'm almost wondering if it's something to do with the high capacity SSD except it seems to be getting progressively worse over time.

 

[Grobe]

If you have an extra hdd laying around, you could clone the ssd into that hdd, take out the ssd and boot the system using the hdd.

That will strongly indicate if the problem lays within the ssd or something else.

 

[ElectrO_90]

Download and install Hard Disk Sentinel - free for 30 days
Will give you proper diagnostics in English so you know what's wrong with drive and how long it has before it dies a death.

 

[Ruarc88]

Download and install Hard Disk Sentinel - free for 30 days
Will give you proper diagnostics in English so you know what's wrong with drive and how long it has before it dies a death.

All drives showing 100% health. SSD in particular reporting >1000 days remaining/3.4TB of writes. It is showing average of around 49 degrees though. This shouldn't be a problem since the drive is rated for up to 70 degrees, but wondering if it is actually thermal throttling. All freezing seems to be on small files with high IO. Ran a test transfer of a single 16GB file (peaked at 1.6 GB/s) and temp maintained 49-50 degrees.

 

[ElectrO_90]

Then if it is not a physical problem, it's got to be a software problem
Boot up into windows safe mode and play around with your computer and see if it still does the same.
IF it does, then I am not sure. - Maybe malware on your computer.
If it doesn't then it has to be software you have installed. You can eliminate a lot of it with the startup config and stop things loading in.

 

[BringerOfTea]

Any reason you are not on windows 10? why have you downclocked?