[SOLVED] Windows 10 Disk Usage 100% while playing games

[blackpassi0n]

Hi Everyone,

So I know that this is asked all the time, but I have tried every solution including buying a new SSD with no luck. So maybe someone can help shed some light.

About 2 weeks ago, I noticed that my computer would have micro-stutters or lock up for 1/2 a second while playing CS:GO. After looking at task manager I saw that this coincided with spikes in the hard drive usage. At the time I had two separate drives.

Local Disk (C: ) - Solid State 128GB
Gaming Drive (D: ) - WD Red 4TB Hard Drive (please forgive me for not being fully on solid state)

Drive D was the one having issues and locking up. I went through about 15 different "fixes" for this issue, before just getting a new hard drive. I tried setting to high performance, turning off windows search/superfetch, ran through regedit, adjusted chrome settings, ran chkdsk, and anything else that any popular articles suggested. I went out and bought a Samsung 860 EVO 1TB SSD.

I installed the new hard drive and reinstalled my games on this drive. After I booted up CS:GO I had the same 100% disk usage problem, but now on Disk C...

Can anyone think of any application/feature that would cause the issue to shift from one drive to the next?

 

[camieabz]

A) A lack of RAM, so drive cache and swap file usage gets too high.

B) A lack of raw power in the system, such as slow RAM or CPU so everything blips.

Run a benchmark and post to the results page - https://www.userbenchmark.com

 

[blackpassi0n]

A) A lack of RAM, so drive cache and swap file usage gets too high.

B) A lack of raw power in the system, such as slow RAM or CPU so everything blips.

Run a benchmark and post to the results page - https://www.userbenchmark.com

Here are the results of my UserBenchmark:
https://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/14094276

 

[Solandri]

Open task manager. Right-click the task bar and click on Task Manager.

Click on "More details" on the bottom, and switch to the Performance tab.

Click on "Open Resource monitor."

Click on the Disk tab. That'll let you see which processes are reading/writing to the disk. Hopefully narrow down the culprit.

 

[camieabz]

Yup, what Solandri said. Your RAM is the 'slow' part of your system compared to other similar RAM scores, but there's plenty of it, so I would look at the software / processes if you feel the system/RAM is fast enough most of the time.

 

[blackpassi0n]

Open task manager. Right-click the task bar and click on Task Manager.

Click on "More details" on the bottom, and switch to the Performance tab.

Click on "Open Resource monitor."

Click on the Disk tab. That'll let you see which processes are reading/writing to the disk. Hopefully narrow down the culprit

I did this last night and could see that while running CS:GO my drive (Drive C) would jump to 100% every time the game needed to access a batch of .VPK files (Located on Drive D). The issue also persisted across multiple games on Steam. I completely reinstalled Steam as well as CSGO to see if maybe some funky juju happened with the install, but had no luck. I'm at work right now but I can run the resource monitor when I get home and give some more exact answers.

 

[blackpassi0n]

So it looks like I had a freakish error where both of my hard drives died at just about the same time. I replaced both hard drives and my computer is running fine now.