How do I circumvent "100% disk usage", upgrade to faster HDD or SSD?

Toggle sidebar Toggle sidebar
D

Dylan_K_4

Commendable
Dec 12, 2016
12
0
1,510
Is my HDD just too old slow? Could I upgrade to a faster HDD so that I wouldn't run into 100% disk usage problem? Using an SSD in its place would make this happen less? Root of the problem?

My specs (if they might be relevant to the question)
AsRock H97 Pro 4 motherboard
1TB SATA HDD
Intel i5-4950
GTX 1080


Thanks
 
Solution
InvalidError

Sluggish response time while booting is normal since you have tons of background processes loading stuff from storage at the same time. The simplest fix for that would be to upgrade your boot drive to an SSD.

Poor performance later on with "lots of programs at once" could be due to swapping and reloading from disk if you are low/out of spare RAM for running software and caching frequently accessed files. In that case, you need more RAM.
Sort by date Sort by votes
L

little_me

Splendid
May 9, 2015
1,671
39
21,740
Root of the problem might be something else, while SSD would fix the disk usage times, it wouldn't really fix the need for said disk usage itself.

Since you have not mentioned amount of ram you have, I suspect it is less than 16GB and as such, since your GPU has 8GB of VRAM, it is extremely likely that a LOT of swap file caching is being done, which would possibly explain the disk usage while gaming/using said GPU.

If disk usage happens at other times too, the cause would yet again be something else.

You could relatively easily see paging file usage with perfmon.exe by adding paging file to the graph list. then compare it's % to your paging file size.
Is any process listed as using the disk in task manager?
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
InvalidError

InvalidError

Titan
Moderator
May 18, 2007
23,815
5,265
108,890
There are three family of reasons for 100% disk usage:
- a dying HDD that is taking far too long to respond to request
- not enough RAM to keep frequently accessed data in RAM (be it re-loading discarded data from HDD or swapping RAM pages)
- you are working with too much data to reasonably cache or otherwise keep in RAM

In the first case, replace the HDD. In the second one, add/upgrade the RAM capacity if you can afford to - you could put the swapfile on an SSD to reduce swap lag but if your swapfile is seeing heavy traffic, this could burn through the SSD's program-erase cycle count rather quickly. If you are dealing with large data sets, then an SATA or NVMe SSD to work from might be necessary.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
D

dylannn44

Jun 25, 2018
14
0
10
Hi,

Sorry for not updating this question. Had a busy day.

To help me figure what might be the problem, I'd like to add that I have 8.0 GB of Ram. My motherboard is an AsRock H97 Pro 4 and 2 out of the 4 RAM slots are currently filled. The 2x 4GB sticks of RAM is the original two which I bought in 2013 when I built the PC. The HDD is a 1 TB HDD and is the original one which I bought in 2013.

I do tend to get 100% disk usage when opening new programs after reboot, or after not frequently using the PC and coming back to it after a day or so (its been left on).

Also noticable when I "right-click" folders or shortcuts on my desktop, it will sometimes but not always (somewhat random) take a long time to load the dropdown menu.

I don't notice it at all when I am gaming.

Does this information help in narrowing down what the problem might be? If not, what other informations can I provide? I would like to buy either an SSD or RAM to fix the problem. But I don't know which one would be of greater help.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
InvalidError

InvalidError

Titan
Moderator
May 18, 2007
23,815
5,265
108,890

I have 32GB of RAM in my PC and sometimes get that non-responsive task-bar/Explorer issue, usually after I haven't rebooted my PC in a long time - a 'long time' for me typically meaning over a month. If your reboots are several weeks apart like me, then the sluggishness may simply be a bug/leak issue somewhere in the OS or a background task.

UI response can also be sluggish if the HDDs spun down from being idle and needs to spin back up for some reason if you enabled that power-saving feature, especially for people who have an SSD for most of their frequently used stuff and a HDD that sits idle most of the time.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
D

dylannn44

Jun 25, 2018
14
0
10
I've been reading over your replies and thinking more about the issue to determine what is my cause.

If it's something that happens mostly when I start up my PC or when I am running a lot of programs at once, (such as many tabs in Google Chrome) does this help give any more signs of where the issue might be?
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
InvalidError

InvalidError

Titan
Moderator
May 18, 2007
23,815
5,265
108,890

Sluggish response time while booting is normal since you have tons of background processes loading stuff from storage at the same time. The simplest fix for that would be to upgrade your boot drive to an SSD.

Poor performance later on with "lots of programs at once" could be due to swapping and reloading from disk if you are low/out of spare RAM for running software and caching frequently accessed files. In that case, you need more RAM.
 
Upvote 1 Downvote
Solution
D

dylannn44

Jun 25, 2018
14
0
10


This is the detailed answer I was looking for, thanks a lot for taking the time. I'll login to my other account later today to pick yours as best answer. Making a new thread on type of ram to buy...

 
Upvote 0 Downvote
You must log in or register to reply here.

TRENDING THREADS

Latest posts

Moderators online

Share this page

COMPANY
RESOURCES
FOLLOW
Top Bottom