100% HDD Usage lately when gaming

Hello everyone. I've run into a bit of an irritating issue concerning my storage drive (standard western digital hdd). When i'm gaming, particularly The Division ( and also the beta for The Division 2) my disk usage jumps to 100% and causes a ton of lag. I don't experience this with any other game currently(not even the Witcher 3 or HEAVILY modded skyrim and fallout 4). Now this is system is about 4-5 years old now, but it still chugs along aside from that. Also to note.. this is my storage drive. My OS in on an SSD, completely separate.

I've done a defrag, and even a few disk checks for bad sectors and everything is showing that its still a relatively healthy drive. I've seen several people say that its windows 10 doing? but I don't understand how that would be the case since this drive only contains games. Any thoughts and help would be greatly appreciated.

Faith said:

Considering that The Division can use up a lot of memory, it could be that the game is "paging" through your harddrive instead of system memory? This happens when there's no system memory left to buffer to. Check your RAM usage and standby memory in task manager, see if it goes over 7.8GB for you. Likely suspects for this is either insufficient RAM or an application leak.

So after entering Div2 and running around getting into fire fights, it hovers around 6.9 and then spikes to 7.4 during heavy gunfire, so its about the same as Div1. I do know they eat up memory like its nothing lol.. but it was never like this with the first one. I put in 300 hours in the first without it lagging so bad. It started after I reinstalled it after a break.

Faith said:

How long did you take a break? The Division are live service games and can quite frequently update to use more memory. Open task manager and under background programs and services look for service host superfecth/prefetch running in the background when these lag spikes occur. While we can't be sure if this is your issue at this time, as a FYI; 8GB is not doing it anymore in games for today I'm afraid. 7.4GB spikes are quite high on your 8GB limit. Paging happens when it close to its pool limit.

I saw no superfetch or prefetch during the next run around. So it would seem 8gb has run its course, at least in this instance. Hmmmm. I suppose I should just hold out until my next build.

If you're system still runs game fine, just another another stick of the same 8GB ram.

RoasterMen said:

If you're system still runs game fine, just another another stick of the same 8GB ram.

Faith said:

Yep, just make sure you add an identical stick into it. Same ID, number, capacity, timings and everything. But again, we're not 100% sure if this is the problem you have though. There seems to be conflicting messages around TD1 in particular regarding 8gb. Some say adding more helped while others are still having high hdd activity in this title, so you are not alone. Some are also stating it's how Windows is compressing and decompressing textures and assets, but this should be done via memory to my knowledge. Certainly running these games to an SSD would help considerly if this is the case.

Yea, ive already priced it lol. It looks like thats what I have to do.. which is not a big deal. My next build wont be for awhile anyway, so a bit more ram it is. Thanks for the quick replies!

@Cgamon i was wondering if you fixed your issue because i'm having similar game issues on my pc and specifically when playing the division 2 disk usage is at 100% and the game is mostly unplayable to huge stuttering which did not happen to me when playing the first game.