Hard drive always at 100% Windows 10

Retro6

Retro6

Retro6

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Joined
30 Jan 2019
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953
This issue has been driving me absolutely bonkers. Hard drive is always at 100% on my Laptop. I'm not able to do very much on it as its just taking to long, for example I go to the search bar and it takes forever to just to be able to type something in and then another 15 minutes until I can access settings, sometimes this problem has gone away when I hard power off the laptop and back on again but this time the problem isn't going away. I tried switching off the wifi to see if the problem was something downloading like an update or something, I've restarted the computer as well but the hard drive is still at 100% I've had a look in task manager and I can't see anything obvious.

I'm able to browse the internet with ease but doing anything in the desktop is painfully slow with the hard drive L.E.D constantly lit. I can just about access the task manager.

Any help on this?
 
If it is Windows doing something then an SSD will not solve the activity issue, check Windows Resource Monitor as mentioned above.

It could be the HDD has bad sectors and the built in error correction is doing its thing trying to reread the bad sectors over and over again.
 
If it's not the HDD failing (Install Crystal Diskinfo to check this) and you can't spot a specific application causing this then it may just be the HDD struggling with paging. Windows 10 grinds to a crawl especially with HDDs eventually unless refresh or re-installed periodically. Could also simply be the HDD filling up and how much RAM by the way? Windows 10 should be doing a partial defrag by default on a HDD in the background.

It's worth running "Disk Clean-up" but select the "Check System Files" option as Windows updates take up a lot of space on the drive and need to be cleaned out. On a HDD this process could take a while to complete.

Alternatively install CCleaner and run some of the clean up tools to do similar to the above.

Best advice is to swap to an SSD anyway if you can as that can make quite a difference to the general Windows experience.

PS I just ran Disk Clean-up and deleted 8GB of files mostly update install files taking about a minute on my M.2 NVME system drive.
 
Disable sleep and standby so Windows remains on and leave the laptop turned on and logged in for a few hours, or until the activity stops. I would guess that Windows is trying to do some maintenance in the background and isn't getting time to complete.

If the activity is still heavy after a couple of hours, I would suspect that the hard drive is on it's last legs and the slowness might be a sign of this. In which case backup and use this opportunity to install an SSD.
 
Check the antimalware service isn't sitting there chewing CPU and Disc IO - sometimes it seems to get its knickers in a twist while updating definitions and goes into an infinite loop (sometimes it just needs half an hour to sort it self out) - unfortunately it is a bit more of an art than a science getting it to force reapply a definitions update due to the way MS have taken control away from the end user.

Also possible if you have stuff like McAfee or Norton installed they are doing scans and slowing everything down especially on HDD and/or if there is a conflict with them and another piece of security software.
 
Replace with an SSD, fresh install of Windows 10. Problem solved.

All PCs since Vista came out should have an SSD. Really hampering performance if you don't have one.
 
Personally I turn off indexing and all the search stuff. Win10 is always running something. SSD helps, but doesn't solve the problem.
I also turn off automatic updates for schedule ones. otherwise it always updating. Likewise sleep mode, just kills the battery. I turn that off also.
 
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