Question Large freezes in and out of game

[zaphod2beeble]

Hi, I've been having issues with freezes for about 2 months now. What I've been able to see so far is that they seem to correlate with high usage of my HDD (usually at 100% during a freeze) and they don't seem to be limited only to games. Things like Chrome will freeze when coming out of fullscreen. One thing that seems weird to me about these freezes is, that the whole system tends to freeze not just the programm I was using. In general I've felt these freezes have been occuring when I tab into a program that I haven't been using in the foreground for a little bit. An example is spotify, the program will be running and I'll be listening to music, but it will freeze and be really stuttery for a couple seconds after I pull it up. Another example is Chrome which does the same as Spotify. Most programs upon starting them, will load into a sort of frozen, unfinished kind of shell before becoming functional and drawing all their elements.
Loading times have also drastically increased for some of the games installed on the HDD
I've also had issues streaming, where encoder and game settings that worked without any issues will cause stuttering and freezes in game - usually occuring more often, the longer the game has been running.

My PC has one 1TB 970 EVO and a 3TB WD blue. The 970 EVO has a 126GB C partition and an 804GB E partition - the HDD is just one partition (D).

I've not really known where to start with this issue as it's quite broad, but here's what I've done so far:
Run CHKDSK on both my drives
Tried a different GPU
Updated windows
Updated GPU drivers

It's worth noting that these freezes didn't concur with any sort of hardware changes.

If you have any suggestions I'd be happy to hear them as I'm kind of at a loss myself.

Thank you!

 

[rgd1101]

how full is the c partition?

 

[zaphod2beeble]

how full is the c partition?

I can't believe I hadn't thought of this, but there were about 5GB free, I ended up shrinking the E partition by 50GB and extending the C partition by 50GB (had to move the partitions with easeUS to allow me to extend the C partition but I got there.
I've literally just done this so I'll let you know if it changed anything.

I'd disregarded the option of it being missing space on the C partition because it was the HDD maxing out, while the SSD sat at 2% usage, but thinking about it might have been causing the problems, but as said I'll see if it's fixed the problems shortly.

Thanks so far!