Need help narrowing down cause of 100% disk use

Hi there!

I've been having problems with 100% disk use on my HP Pavilion Laptop for a long time (a year?), generally without seeing what I would imagine are high read/write rates. It's gradually gotten to the point where the machine is super slow from 100% disk use about half of the time, which as I'm sure you can imagine is very aggravating. It's an HDD, and the current OS version is Windows 10 Home Version 1909. I have only 8GB of RAM, but this happens even when I'm using only 60% of it or less.

I've read some of the other threads on this forum about similar issues, but I'm only moderately techy and a little bit confused about where to start. I'm too busy to just try every single random online "fix" for this symptom, and it seems like maybe people here could help me more efficiently get the bottom of it.

I'm attaching some screenshots from Resource Monitor to get started. Happy to provide other information as needed.



Any and all help very much appreciated!

EDIT: I was typing my response while dalchina responded. Try those suggestions, if that gets you nowhere, please try waht I outlined below to get us some data to start.

I agree that it seems odd that the disk is active 100% of the time, but you will want to note that there is a huge difference between % time that the drive is active vs the actual utilization percentage.

As an example, a disk can be active nearly 100% of the time but if it is doing very tiny reads and/or writes it may still barely impact performance.

From the screenshots that you provided, that seems to be exactly what is going on here.

Also, I noticed from one of your screenshots that the disk cleanup utility was running, wondering if that might have something to do with it.

Let's take a look at this another way...

Open Task Manager (ALT + CTRL + DEL, then select Task Manager).

Go to the processes tab and click on the Disk column to sort in order of disk usage. Note: Make sure that the arrow in the disk column points down to indicate that highest usage is displayed first. If not, click that column again.

Grab another screenshot - no need to get the whole thing if there are many processes, just the top 10 or so should be plenty.

Go to the performance tab and grab a screenshot there as well. Note: A screenshot can be a little misleading because the numbers can bounce around a lot. The graph portion of the screen helps a lot, but pay particular attention to the Average response time statistic near the bottom of the screen. Give me a rough idea of what the highest number you see there is.

We are mainly interested in the C: drive, but you may want to grab this info for other disks as well.

Let's start there and see where that takes us.

Can you post your HD S.M.A.R.T. attributes? You can use Clear Disk Info or another similar tool.

dalchina said:

Disk usage 100% please help

Do you have Superfetch enabled? If you do, try disabling it, restarting, then the advice in post #45.

Thanks. I saw that post when I was searching the forum, but I actually can't even find Superfetch in the Services Manager. Is it called something else now? It's possible I did something with it in the past that I've forgotten now.

dalchina said:

More if you search the forum for
Disk 100% usage
e.g.

Yeah, that's what I did, but I just still feel a little lost. Sorry to post again on such a common topic though.

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hsehestedt said:

EDIT: I was typing my response while dalchina responded. Try those suggestions, if that gets you nowhere, please try waht I outlined below to get us some data to start.

Okay thanks! I'll try to figure out the Superfetch thing first, and then try the stops

hsehestedt said:

We are mainly interested in the C: drive, but you may want to grab this info for other disks as well.

The only other drive, D:, is just a recovery partition. Is that still something that could be causing a problem?

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eLPuSHeR said:

Can you post your HD S.M.A.R.T. attributes? You can use Clear Disk Info or another similar tool.

What exactly are S.M.A.R.T. attributes, and where would I find them in Clear Disk Info?

dalchina said:

Yes, I forgot that- now Sysmain

Ah, okay. It is already enabled, set to automatic. The post you linked to appears to be instructions on how to enable it. Are you saying I should disable it, reboot, and then re-enable it?

Wingnutfish said:

What exactly are S.M.A.R.T. attributes, and where would I find them in Clear Disk Info?

All modern disks has a Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology (S.M.A.R.T.)
Clear Disk Info or CrystalDiskInfo will retrieve this data log and show the if the disk is healthy.

I would also do a disk check. Open a CMD window and type
chkdsk c: /scan

Megahertz said:

All modern disks has a Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology (S.M.A.R.T.)
Clear Disk Info or CrystalDiskInfo will retrieve this data log and show the if the disk is healthy.

I would also do a disk check. Open a CMD window and type
chkdsk c: /scan

Ah, okay. So what you're suggesting is for me to export or copy/paste a S.M.A.R.T. log file from Clear Disk Info? I could probably do that.

I did do a disk check a few months ago, but I guess it wouldn't hurt to do it again.