Disk usage jumps to 100 while doing even the lightest of tasks in Windows 10

[Saksham Prakash]

My laptop specs-
i5 3rd Gen
4GB RAM (I'm going to upgrade)
Intel HD 4000
750 GB HDD
I have updated all my drivers and Windows to the latest ones as of 15 May 2017 and I did a clean format 2-3 months back.

I was getting a constant 100 disk usage since the time I clean formatted my PC and installed a couple of programs.
I searched the internet for solutions and finally managed to bring down the disk usage by disabling a ton of background services, changing the paging file size and what not.
I have defragged all the partitions using defraggler and have used every other tips and tricks to get my pc more responsive.

However my problem now is that even if I launch the Windows Explorer or just plain other light stuff, my disk usage still goes up to 100 for a couple of seconds making it very unresponsive and laggy. Waking up the device keeps me waiting too and it is really hard to work on such a crawling laptop.

My Question:
Is my HDD going bad? Should I get a new HDD considering the current one is 3-4 years old? What is causing the disk usage to go high?

Note:
I figured that I was running short of RAM while using photoshop so I'm going to upgrade soon.
Link: http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-3415171/ram-ram-configuration-laptop-lenovo-g580.html

Also I was considering an eGPU setup as the HD4000 graphics are of no use.
Link: http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-3415157/egpu-setup-lenovo-g580-mini-pci.html

I'm going to use this pc for light video editing, photo editing and gaming at 1080p.
This is gonna be my primary setup for 6-7 months. After that I might get a new gaming laptop.

 

[Karadjgne]

Open task manager and look for what's using up so much usage.
You can run crystal disk to see if your hdd is healthy or not.
Did you reload all the laptop drivers when you reloaded windows?

 

[Saksham Prakash]

Open task manager and look for what's using up so much usage.
You can run crystal disk to see if your hdd is healthy or not.
Did you reload all the laptop drivers when you reloaded windows?

Task manager shows some 'system' process (NT kernel and system), svchost.exe, and sometimes chrome.exe and explorer.exe taking up the HDD.

Crystal Disk Info shows the 'Good' status for my HDD.

Yes I reloaded all the laptop drivers. I got them from the official lenovo site and I'm very confident all my drivers are up to date.

 

[Karadjgne]

Chase that process down, what's the parent program?

 

[Saksham Prakash]

Chase that process down, what's the parent program?

It never stays the same. Always changes But it's mostly under the 'system' name.
Also, the disk usage stays around 0 when Idle (no prob). It is only when I decide to launch something, it goes up. Should I just get an SSD? (I'm frustrated with the short life of HDDs and how they're slowing down for me)

 

[manv]

From my own experience what solved my problem was indeed disabling some background processes like windows search, windows update and BITS from the services menu.
If you are planning to use the system for gaming I do recommend that you get an SSD for storing your OS and important applications as those would slow down your gaming performance if they are on an HDD with your games.
But now that you say your HDD usage spikes when launching an app let me ask you what your average RAM usage is .
Such spikes are seen in systems with very low ram and very high utilization in which the OS tries to allocate some extra ram by dumping some unused files on the ram to your HDD. Please do post your average ram utilization.

 

[Saksham Prakash]

From my own experience what solved my problem was indeed disabling some background processes like windows search, windows update and BITS from the services menu.
If you are planning to use the system for gaming I do recommend that you get an SSD for storing your OS and important applications as those would slow down your gaming performance if they are on an HDD with your games.
But now that you say your HDD usage spikes when launching an app let me ask you what your average RAM usage is .
Such spikes are seen in systems with very low ram and very high utilization in which the OS tries to allocate some extra ram by dumping some unused files on the ram to your HDD. Please do post your average ram utilization.

Right now with two tabs open in chrome, my RAM utilization is around 50%. So 2 Gigs are free. This easily goes up to 99-100% when I'm using photoshop and other memory intensive stuff.

I was going to upgrade my RAM to 8 or 12GBs anyway.
So if what you're telling is right, it should solve my problem with disk usage also.
Thanks! I'll be posting the results after installing another Ram stick