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Increase your mechanical drive (HDD) performance - Hell Corner
Here are some hints for the proud owners of HDDs & SSHDs to increase their hard drive performance since even the best of systems might have a secondary one of those , which might act as a system bottle neck to a point :
1 - It is better to have your manufacturer driver for SATA controller (Often referred to as Intel Rapid Storage Technology Driver or RST Raid by manufacturers) in "Device Manager > IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers" no matter how old it is . If windows persist to update it to a different version you may well have to tick "System Properties > Hardware > Device Installation Settings" to [No] to stop Microsoft from installing its own crippled drivers .
2 - Often check "Disk Usage" (sometimes Disk) in "Task Manager" in PC idle times , it should be at 0% for elongated time spans . Fluctuating disk usage when PC is idle is usually caused by either poorly designed Antiviruses , crazy Superfetch indexing service or use of system Swap . If present you should fix it by swapping Antivirus by a more calm one (Or nagging your current one's support for a fix) , disable Superfetch service (found in services.msc) and finally note that 8 GB Ram + is the norm nowadays , any less and the Swap file abuse may surface . (If you are wondering as of why you should do this , it is simply because the reading header of the mechanical disk will be stressed trying to either process or copy files you are currently using and yet do the other Antivirus or OS disk activities at the same time which would slow it down significantly) .
3 - Schedule your system to defrag over night , clustered data leave the reading headers stressed trying to collect data from different clusters than if it was in sequential order .
4 - Sometimes windows do a suspicious habit of downloading updates in background without that showing in system until they are ready to install , this might cause the system to show some lag while processing something or playing games . If you are not very fond of that habit you may well set your internet connection to a "Metered" which would inhibit that & increase your disk performance . Yet remember to do manual checks for updates from time to time .
5 - Another suspicious behavior you might find yourself enrolled in without your consent is "Microsoft Customer Experience Program" basically the claim is that this program only triggers when PC is idle to collect and send who knows what data to Microsoft to process and customize your experience (Really?) . However you might find this program triggering at the peek of your usage and hinder your CPU performance by 25~50% and disk usage by around 50% often showing in Task Manager under alias "Microsoft Compatibility Telemetry" . If you get to notice it doing that just run Task Scheduler (taskschd.msc) : Microsoft > Windows > Application Experience - and rather disable both : "Microsoft Compatibility Appraiser" & "ProgramDataUpdater" tasks then reboot .
6 - System restore was initially designed to trigger on schedule but since systems might be off at scheduled times it often runs out of random during user activity , I can not recommend shutting it off despite I often do , but as a hint , when this beast is on , expect everything to slow down not just hard drives .
Last edited by nIGHTmAYOR; 02 Oct 2018 at 06:25.