SSD causing 90 to 100% CPU usage?

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Skynet2020

Skynet2020

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Apr 25, 2015
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I bought a Samsung 850 250GB SSD. I formatted my old HDD and installed windows 10 from a flash drive onto the new SSD. Everything was going well until I noticed my CPU was idling at 25% and when I ran programs like Norton 360 it would hit 100% during scan on C drive only. When it got to the D drive it went back to 25 to 30% CPU usage. Windows update caused 100% CPU usage as well, but I can't figure out what was causing it since everything I ran caused it to sky rocket! After 3 days I went back to windows 7 and had the same problem. I then installed windows 7 onto my old HDD and problem is gone. Idle is 1 to 5% CPU usage and Norton don't burn up no more then 20% CPU during full system scan. I think maybe my system can't handle a SSD or I got something screwed up somewhere or this might be normal for an SSD. That is why i'm here before I send it back for a replacement. It could be something I have configured wrong. This is my first SSD, so it's possible.

list of things I tried before coming to this:
1. Flashed bios
2. updated all drivers after clean install of windows
3. Ran Norton, Malware bites and Combo fix in safe mode.
4. Checked both sticks of ram
5. removed both GPU's and used integrated graphics during clean install.
6. made sure that SSD had the latest firmware
7. took Norton off
8. tried a different PSU
9. tried windows 7 and 10
10 unplugged everything, took cmos battery out, took GPU's out, unplugged all my HDD's, unplugged my blue ray burner, took out one ram stick and did a flesh install of windows 10.

my pc specs
Asus Maximus vi Hero
intel i5 4670k
8GB of Vengeance ram 1600 Mhz
2 Asus ROG Striker 760
corsair AX 850 power supply unit
Samsung evo 850 250GB
two WD Blue 1TB HDD


 
Solution
MarkW
Your CPU, if properly cooled, can run at 100% load for years. Same with the GPU.

Heat is the CPU/GPU killer. Or power surges. But not overworking. This is not a human with a slave driver cracking the whip. It is an electronic device that was created to compute. Its not going to hurt it to make it compute.
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Its not normal for any storage device, much less an SSD. An SSD spends over 99% of its time of a gaming system at full idle. Which is why this is screwy.

I have heard of Windows 10 systems doing this. But it ended when they reloaded Windows 7 or 8.1. The fact your system did not go back to "normal" is what is disturbing to me. Windows 10 has a long ways to go before it is mostly bug free, and well optimized. But Windows 7 and 8.1 have been there for years.

I think I would ask your retailer to RMA the SSD. Get another one. These are normally very good SSD's. Almost to a person here, we prefer Samsung SSD's. And I think that says a lot about them.
 
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That is why I came here first before I send it back, so this is not normal? Also, it does function good
😉. Just I don't like seeing 100% of my Cpu being used on a task that should only take 25% at most.

 
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Got another one on the way. It will be here Aug. 8 :) I will report back when I install windows 7 on the new SSD. Just hope this the problem. Can't think of anything else other then the mobo :??:

 
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Me too. But I think you had to start with the new addition. That's the most logical thing to do.

When you get the new SSD, hopefully it will look more like this... I did intentionally wait for a point where both the read and write numbers down at the bottom were non-zeros...

i1mg0h.jpg
 
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Got my new SSD today and installed windows 10 on both of them. The new SSD acts the same as the other one does while running Norton. Took some screenshots to show you. Hope you can view them.

Running Norton on C drive.
http://i.imgur.com/OxHOugk.jpg


Took this off the program that came with my SSD. Don't no why F drive don't show that I have an OS and I don't no if these numbers are good or bad.
http://i.imgur.com/61PN84k.jpg

Same as the top, but the new SSD results.
http://i.imgur.com/61PN84k.jpg

Running windows defender on C drive about a minute into scan
http://i.imgur.com/0hEc6FI.jpg

Running windows defender on C drive and showing performance.
http://i.imgur.com/5ZCRde4.jpg

Running windows defender on C drive high CPU usage, but nothing like Norton.
http://i.imgur.com/5WlWpoj.jpg

I don't think both of these drives are bad. I think Norton is just bad on solid state drives. Still my HDD uses way less on CPU running Norton and windows defender. I'm going to run defender on my second SSD shortly to see if it acts the same way and go ahead and format it and return it or I might just keep it for a month and then buy it :) If you can see anything wrong please let me know.
 
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Ran Norton again and as you can see it uses way to much of the disk and CPU.
http://i.imgur.com/xFTc2uX.jpg

I also ran defender on the other SSD and it is acting the same way, so it seems to me Norton is the cause and I will be formatting both of these drives and starting over with fresh install of windows 10 on one of these drives soon. There could be other issues I am not seeing in the screenshots, so I hope to get a reply from you soon and thanks for the help.
😉

 
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Yes. I linked my screenshot of that a couple days ago... Scroll back up a bit.

I am glad you isolated Norton as being the problem. I knew there was a reason I quit using that about 2 decades ago. At one time, there was nothing better than Norton out there. And then it just became bloated ... I'll be nice and stop there... :)

Since it looks like Norton was your antivirus, and I never like to see anyone go without a good antivirus program, I'd like to recommend Trend Micro Maximum Security. If you are worried about it, it stops it. I renewed for a second year a couple months ago. And since then, it caught some files that were coming in from a website that I never expected problems with, but it turned out they had some stuff attached to some video ads they were running. I emailed them the logs from Trend Micro, and less than 24 hours later, the ads went poof.

You can buy it online at Trend Micro. I paid $44.95, and that will cover 3 machines. Even mobile. You can download it as soon as your payment is verified, which only took a few seconds.

I just went there to make sure I had the link URL right, and it seems they are now offering a free 30 day trial on the Trend Micro Maximum Security. If nothing else, it would give you a month to see if you like it, and I'll bet it doesn't mess up your SSD's. I have a 1TB Samsung 840 EVO, and even when my weekly scan is happening, I just keep on using my system. Rest of the time, my system idles at about 5% CPU usage, and 0% hard drive use.

Anyways, this got long...
 
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It seems Norton was not the problem. Trend micro also uses up 100% of my CPU. Another thing aswell watching YouTube videos causes it to jump up to 100%. It seems everything is the problem and that's just not possible. My old HDD seems to work fine with windows 10. It's not causing this. These 850 SSDs got a problem.
 
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intel (R) Core (TM) i5 -4670K 3.40 GHz 801 MHz

Corsair Vengeance 8 GB (2 x 4 GB) DDR3 1600 MHz PC3 12800 240-Pin DDR3 Dual Channel

ASUS MAXIMUS VI HERO DDR3 2800 LGA 1150 Motherboard socket for 4th Generation Intel Core i7/ i5/ i3/ Pentium / Celeron Processors

2x ASUS Graphics Cards STRIKER-GTX760-P-4GD5

2x Samsung 850 EVO 250GB 2.5-Inch SATA III Internal SSD

WD Blue 1TB Desktop 3.5 Inch SATA 6Gb/s 7200rpm Internal Hard Drive


Hope I got everything. I just pulled this info off the sites I bought each item from 😉
Yeah it seems everything causes a spike to 100% usage on the CPU, but i'm virus free. I think it's these solid state drives, because when I run windows on my HDD it works fine sadly :pfff:
 
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Did you set some kind of power save thing in the BIOS? Your CPU is at idle at 801Mhz.

Have you enabled AHCI in the BIOS? Doing so now *might* force you to reinstall Windows on the SSD. AHCI is a driver that normally should be enabled anything an SSD is added to a system. But a small number of people seem to have problems with it.
 
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The only thing I do in the bios is load optimized defaults and set the fans to silent mode on the easy page. I don't know what AHCI. I will look it up and figure it out in my bios. I did flash my bios yesterday to the new 1603 version they released on my motherboard. Thought maybe that was the problem, but sadly it's not. I took trend micro off and am running windows defender for now. I do use malwarebytses anti malware, so no infections should come in 😉
It seems my CPU ramps up opening pages on google and programs. I was playing a game last night called eve online and having to screens going my CPU never hit above 40%. Only when recording using fraps will it go crazy, but that's normal from what I know about good old fraps :)
I will look this AHCI up and how to enable it in my bios.
 
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When your CPU is going nuts, open up task manager, and on the Processes tab, click the CPU header and watch what it is that is nailing your CPU like that. I mean somethings, like an antivirus program have to read the files on the hard drive to check for viruses, and even fraps is going to be writing a large amount of data out, so at those times, you should expect a high percentage of CPU usage.

But if your CPU is staying at 801Mhz when gaming, then that is the problem. It should be at 3.5Ghz. Or higher.
 
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AHCI is enabled, but in my bios it's at the top and all the sata ports are below it with something called hot plug? I am guessing when this is enabled it is enabled for all sata ports?. Also, my cpu power is in turbo mode and I see what your seeing now in task manager. My CPU is stuck at 0.80 GHz!!! I don't understand why. CPUID says 3.7 Ghz 🙁

 
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There is a lot of stuff making it go crazy, but one stands out Microsoft search indexer and google right now. It is taking up 70% of my CPU right now just those 2 things, but Microsoft search indexer only uses up CPU when moving files or opening things like my downloads folder for example.

 
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Well, the lines you posted when you listed your hardware says the CPU should run at 3.5Ghz.

The only image you posted that shows any real CPU usage was the last one, which shows 52% use, but you had not clicked on that column so that it would show what was causing the 52% usage. In any case, I see nothing showing anything above 52%.

I do not see a CPU-Z screenshot anywhere...

I looked at that Norton image... How do you expect any antivirus program to test every file on the hard drive and not have a high percentage of use during that?

When it is not doing an active scan, what does Norton use up on the CPU?

I'm beginning to think that this is not a problem at all. Both antivirus programs have been a problem according to you. But they both do the same thing. They have to be able to read every file on the hard drive or SSD, compare the contents of those files to its lists of viruses, and then move on to the next file looking constantly for a problem. That requires hard drive time. And lots of it. It is the time when those programs are NOT actively doing a virus scan that I thought was what you were complaining about. And that now does not seem to be the case.

Understand this. the hard drive is far slower than the SSD. The SSD can and will keep the CPU busy. And hard drive will not be able to pull files out fast enough to keep the CPU busy. It will try, but it is not even in the same league as an SSD.

As long as the CPU usage percentage drops way back down after the virus scan is completed, there is no problem.
 
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That is why I chose you as best answer, because I thought my problem was Norton, but that was a fresh install of windows 10. I also have windows 7 on the new SSD that came in. Both are the same on both operating systems. I did have a high CPU idle and stated up a few posts it seemed to be gone. My idle is now at 2% to 5%, but if I open up one folder or do a google search is jumps to 40% to 70%. Norton uses 100% and that is why that junk is no longer on my system. I am about to test Norton and trend micro again soon. I just flashed my bios back to 1505 and task manager shows 3.78 now :) I am guessing it was the 1603 bios I loaded onto it yesterday that caused the task manager to show 0.80GHz.
The reason you did not see anything on CPUID or anything is because that was a fresh install of windows 10. I have loaded my system down now with most of my programs and stuff. I will post screenshots of Norton and trend. If 100% of my CPU is normal running trend or Norton then I am heading back to an HDD. I rather not put that kind of strain on my CPU knowing that my HDD does not use that much CPU usage running Norton.
 
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Could you go to the services tab and see what is using up your CPU? It generally shows what is. Also, have you tried uninstalling Norton completely? That may help. If all else fails, I would reinstall windows as a last resort, since a clean copy may solve it.
 
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