if the hdd is your boot drive, i would also say this is normal, one of th reasons why most move to SSD when they can, windows7 after a while even with a few applications seems to slow down quite a bit.
At one point I waited something like 20 minutes before IO activity settled down, you dont even want to know how long it took to boot. Changed for an SSD on everything i work with and haven't looked back, it drastically reduced boot times and where there are multiple calls being made at the same time when windows is loading, everything is done much faster, not all the boot and desktop loading process is contiguous read/writes, there will be times where it is trying to load several things and thus random reads, here you que depth goes up like a b*tch and a traditional hard drive just has a hard time keeping up with SSD's.
Though you may want to check that avast is configured in the performance options to: see this (
https://www.avast.com/no-no/faq.php?article=AVKB178 )
"
Persistent cache
(YES) Persistent cache refers to storing information about files already verified as clean to speed up later scans.
(yes) Speed up scanning by using the persistent cache - Files already verified as clean are not scanned again.
(YES) Store data about scanned files in the persistent cache - New information about verified clean files is added to the persistent cache during the scan. This can slow down the current scan, but speeds up future scans when the option above is also enabled.
"
Once a full scan of everything is done you should see less activity from Avast on boot up, as it wont scan files again that haven't been modified since last scan.
Ultimately, if you want to keep fragmentation down to 0.
Buy a copy of diskeeper;
http://www.condusiv.com/products/diskeeper/
InteliWrite will make sure it mostly writes contiguous chunks. AutoDefrag works in the background to deal with any thing, and it will do the bootime defrag you want making sure your data is perfectly neat an tidy.
Then again, your MB interface could be the bottleneck here. which hdd? what MB? Are you connected to the fastest SATA port on that MB?
Have you partitioned your 1tb so that windows occupies only the first 200Gb partition and your games are installed on the second 800GB? 'cause i would, system fragmentation is fine(ish), but data and games keep them on a separate partition to make it easier to know if they are fragmented.
What CPU?, what GPU?
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