Hard drive routinely jumps to 100% and is slow

Hello,

My Windows 10 PC has been really slow. I remember it being like this for a while, even back when I had Windows 7. I would really appreciate your help. My Windows Version is 1909 Build 18363.836


Symptoms:

I have a 1TB Seagate ST1000DM hard drive. I noticed that often times the HDD will be at 100% usage, sometimes even with low transfer speed (e.g. less than 1 mb/s). It happens when I open a program, at bootup, and randomly as I use the computer.

When it jumps to 100%, all programs become unresponsive and slow. Programs take ages to open like my web browser, Firefox, as the hard drive thrashes before it finally opens and the HDD settles down.

Other times, the HDD usage is 0% and every open program is smooth until I open a new program. Then the HDD momentarily jumps to 100% and all programs slow down.

At bootup, everything is really sluggish. It takes forever to log in, and the log-in screen is very slow. Finally, everything settles down after at least 10 minutes I recall.

I used a program called Autorun Organizer to disable and delay some startup programs, which helped speed up boot a lot. Still, as the delayed programs open, there is slowdown.

When RAM is filling up, rising to 80% I think, the System process starts using 100% disk usage and everything becomes very slow if not unusuable.

I experimented, and the HDD jumps to 100% frequently such as when I first open programs. I opened Internet Explorer and it jumped to 100% before falling, though later it opened faster and didn't jump the HDD usage. Alarms & Clock app jumped it to 70%, and Voice Recorder jumped it to 85%.

When I opened Calculator just now, Windows Defender showed up and took 60% disk usage and I heard the HDD, but those other times the program itself takes up the disk usage.

I have Epic Games Launcher and Steam installed on my PC. I noticed that Epic Games launcher will try to auto update my games in the background, which slows down the PC.

Troubleshooting Steps:

Windows Security uses a lot of HDD at times. I decided to install BItdefender to see if Win Defender had a problem, but Bitdefender caused my HDD to slow down even more. It caused a black screen for 30 seconds at bootup before the log-in screen loaded, so I removed it.

I've tried to do some troubleshooting with my hard drive. I've checked it with SeaTools using their "Short generic" and "long generic" test, which it passed.

I've also run the SMART test which passed. In addition, CrystalDiskInfo says health is Good and so does Hard Disk Sentinel.

I ran Check Disk, which passed. I ran a full antivirus scan with Win Defender, which found nothing. I ran SFC /scannow which found some corrupt files and fixed them. I also checked Disk Defragmenter and it is good.

Running a "Random 4k" test with Crystal Disk Mark says I have 0.63 read MB/s and 0.85 write MB/s.

I read that I could disable SuperFetch, which helped a lot. Now the computer isn't constantly bogging down from HDD usage. The System process used to cause 100% disk usage, which lead me to the solution. (It still jumps up occasionally, like when I have at least 80% RAM usage.)

I did a fix for the "PCI-express firmware bug," which didn't help. I took some steps from this video: YouTube

Thoughts

I think there's a problem because the hard drive routinely jumps to 100% and slows down from normal actions or randomly slows. It happens when I open Firefox or boot up, and random Windows processes will cause it.

My computer is very old. It's custom built by a friend from 2013, and my HDD is from 2016 I think. It has 9600 power on hours and 4775 power on counts.

Could you help me decide if my hard drive has a problem and needs to be replaced? Thanks!

p.s. I hope everybody's doing okay.

dalchina said:

If you've really run Crystal Diskmark (click All) and left it running long enough for evaluation, your disk can't do very much at all.

Note it populates the numbers slowly.. in the second, it hasn't finished yet.


Disk transfer rate:
Try simply copying a large file from C: to C: and post a screenshot like this while that's happening.


How much free space do you have on C: ?


- noted you have 8Gb RAM, so should be ok.

When you're experiencing high usage, post appropriate screenshots of your task manager with columns organised high to low by clicking the appropriate column header to show processes responsible.

Boot to Safe Mode.
How does your system respond then?

Here is my CrystalDiskmark


Here is my disk transfer rate (I copied 862 MB and 1.62 GB mp4s)


My local disk C: has 43.7 GB free out of 930 GB. I'll definitely try safe mode and I'll post how it goes. I'll also collect some screenshots of Task Manager. Really appreciate it!

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I'm sorry, my first post might've been confusing. I said that Voice Recorder jumps the HDD usage to 85%, but it usually goes down after a bit. I tried opening Voice Recorder again and it did the same behavior. I took a few screenshots as it happened. Hopefully it helps. (I posted it to Imgur so it wouldn't take up space here) Imgur: The magic of the Internet

I have exactly the same problem as you with a labtop that I was loaned for a problem. I am thinking of making a clean installation of windows 10. The labtop worked well when I had made a clean installation about 2 years ago. Since he had one or more build updates.

dalchina said:

See #45 here:
Disk usage 100% please help

and
Windows 10 100% disk usage in Task Manager [SOLVED] - Driver Easy

Oh, man. Do you think poor hard drive performance is causing my problem? I hope my hard drive is okay.

Thank you for sharing those links. :) I'm going to take a look. I still haven't tried safe mode yet but I'll do it today and see how the HDD is.

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itsme1 said:

I have exactly the same problem as you with a labtop that I was loaned for a problem. I am thinking of making a clean installation of windows 10. The labtop worked well when I had made a clean installation about 2 years ago. Since he had one or more build updates.

I'm sorry to hear that. I hope you get it fixed up.

I did a clean installation of windows. The laptop needed it, when restarting the icons in the taskbar + those next to the time, battery etc. did not appear immediately and the started menu did not work immediately. After I deactivated superfetch then I rebooted the laptop, activated superfetch and rebooted 5 times. HDD seems to reach 100% usage less often.

I did not have quite the same problem, when the hdd was 100% of use it did not slow down the applications.

itsme1 said:

I did a clean installation of windows. The laptop needed it, when restarting the icons in the taskbar + those next to the time, battery etc. did not appear immediately and the started menu did not work immediately. After I deactivated superfetch then I rebooted the laptop, activated superfetch and rebooted 5 times. HDD seems to reach 100% usage less often.

I did not have quite the same problem, when the hdd was 100% of use it did not slow down the applications.

I'm glad you fixed your computer! I also re-enabled Superfetch and restarted my computer 6 times. My computer is much more responsive now. It used to be very slow after starting up, but now I've re-enabled most of my start-up programs and the computer still feels fast after starting up. It seems to be more responsive when I open apps too, like Firefox.

It's strange because beforehand, boot was extremely slow with 100% disk usage and even the start menu would be slow. Often times while using the PC, the System process would chew up the HDD and slow everything down. I watched a tech-support video and read some forum posts recommending to disable Superfetch. It seemed to help, but my computer still slowed down sometimes and boot-up was slow. When I re-enabled Superfetch and restarted 6 times, the first few times were very slow, but it sped up by the last restart. Now even using the computer feels faster.

Thanks so much @dalchina, I think your idea fixed the problem. I will still try safe mode and see if any slowdown happens there.

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I still notice Windows Defender briefly causes high disk usage when I ran Photoshop, though it calms down later. Then for a second, Cortana and Win Search Indexer used the HDD.
(I haven't opened Photoshop in a long time)



I only noticed this once so far, but I saw SysMain (Superfetch) causing a lot of HDD usage when I left my computer idle for a bit. As soon as I began doing things again, the SysMain process stopped using the hard disk. Maybe SysMain has background activities that only happen as the computer is idle, because I did not notice a slowdown as I used my PC. I hope it isn't bad for the hard drive to be at 100% as the PC idles, though.