Very slow PC, high disk usage

Happy Crayfish · Sep 3, 2018

I'm having some problems with what I suspect is my harddrive.
When doing anything, even the simplest tasks the harddrive instantly goes to 100%, even if the total usage is like 1MB.

The PC frequently hangs and crashes and it takes ages to load up some applications.
I used CrystalDiskMark to check the performance of the harddrive which gave me these results:

I found some other peoples results with CrystalDiskMark on their harddrive:

And from what I can see my harddrive is severely underperforming on some of the categories, but since I'm not a professional I'd like that to be confirmed by someone who actually knows what all this means.

If my harddrive is having issues like I'm suspecting, what could be the cause of this? I have defragmented the harddrive several times (it also does it every week auomatically), I've ran several virus-searches using Avast and Malwarebytes with no results.

I'm thinking the harddrive is faulty, but I don't really know.

Edit:
I also found this quote on a website:

The maximum value of the Avg. Disk sec/Read performance counter should not exceed 50 milliseconds.

The latency on my harddrive regularly exceeds 50ms.
When using CrystalDiskMark it even went above 20000ms.

ko888 · Sep 3, 2018

What's the brand and model of your hard disk drive?

aldan · Sep 3, 2018

that drive isnt meant for every day computing.its a storage drive and only runs at 5400 rpm.it must be painful to use to say the least.you need to get a hdd to run you os and programs and keep the 6tb for storage.an ssd would really be your best bet.

SkyNetRising · Sep 3, 2018

Those are normal (actually pretty good) values for a mechanical drive.

Happy Crayfish · Sep 3, 2018

ko888 :

Toshiba DT01ACA100 1TB 7200RPM

Happy Crayfish · Sep 3, 2018

SkyNetRising :

Hm okay. Is it normal for the drive to go to 100% as soon as it's doing anything?

Happy Crayfish · Sep 3, 2018

aldan :

The second image isn't my HDD, I added it to compare the stats of mine. (My one is the first image)

SkyNetRising · Sep 3, 2018

Check, what is causing disk activity.
Use Resource Monitor, find "Disk Activity" section, order it by column "Total" and on top you'll see what is causing most disk activity and file being read/written. Post screenshot.

I'd suspect some windows service like windows updates, windows defender, search indexer, disk defragmenter causing this.

Happy Crayfish · Sep 3, 2018

SkyNetRising :

Heres a screenshot

The PC is the slowest when for example opening google chrome. You'd expect an 8-core PC to be able to handle doing several things at once, but as soon as I open a program, or bascially anything else, the rest of the PC freezes too.

SkyNetRising · Sep 3, 2018

No! That's Task Manager (not Resource Monitor).

This is how Resource Monitor looks. Pay close attention. Make your Resource Monitor look the same. Only thing, what's wrong with this example - Disk Activity section is ordered by "I/O priority". That is wrong. You have to order by column Total.

Happy Crayfish · Sep 4, 2018

SkyNetRising :

Oh sorry, here's the resource manager screenshot.

SkyNetRising · Sep 4, 2018

Disk Activity is 1%. You don't have any problem there.

Get a screenshot, when there's 100% Disk Activity.

Happy Crayfish · Sep 4, 2018

SkyNetRising :

According to task manager my disk usage was 100% when I took this screenshot.
I'm not sure if they even measure the same thing though, because resource manager doesn't show 100% when task manager does. The resource manager hasn't shown 100% at any point so far.

SkyNetRising · Sep 4, 2018

Malware Bytes Anti Malware is scanning your HDD excessively. You can see 100% disk activity now.

C: and D: partitions are on same physical disk. Right?
It would be recommended to keep steam library on a different physical drive than OS.

Happy Crayfish · Sep 4, 2018

SkyNetRising :

Yeah they are on the same disk. I would do that but I don't have any disk to put them on at the moment and I don't think it's worth buying one since the PC is decently old.

On my other PCs 100% disk usage doesn't cause the entire PC to slow down and freeze though. (Even if the PC only has a single physical disk)
The performance of the PC (which is 5 years old) is comparable to my other PC which is 12 years old.

The CPU is an 8-core AMD FX-8300, which is usually idling on all cores when a freeze occurs. The RAM has low usage, and it is 8GB 1600MHz which should be fine as far as I know. The GPU is bad, but it shouldn't really matter as long as I'm not doing rendering, right? (The usage on the GPU when a freeze occurs is usually 0%)

SkyNetRising · Sep 4, 2018

Check health of your HDD with HDtune health to rule out possible hardware issues.

Happy Crayfish · Sep 5, 2018

SkyNetRising :

HDtune doesn't find anything wrong.

SkyNetRising · Sep 5, 2018

I'd prefer to see the screenshot.
But, if you're saying it's fine, then it's probably fine.

Very slow PC, high disk usage

Distinguished

Titan

Splendid

Titan

Distinguished

Distinguished

Distinguished

Titan

Distinguished

Titan

Distinguished

Titan

Distinguished

Titan

Distinguished

Titan

Distinguished

Titan

Share this page