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They can but the issue is the type of work. They aren't reading/writing large consistent files. Instead it's a lot of random small files. So constantly is having to change what and where it is accessing files.
With such a low read and write transfer speed, Windows is likely trying to interact with a crap ton of files, and old school mechanical arm drives just don't do well in that arena.
SSD drives have no moving parts in them, they can sometimes breathe life into an older computer. 2TB isn't really that impressive even for storage these days, with 18TB single drives out there.
Best to see if someone can clone the data from your existing drive, at least into a SATA SSD, if your system doesn't have an m.2 slot.
It will legit be better than new
[https://www.amazon.com/Seagate-ST18000NM000J-Internal-Surveillance-Supported/dp/B08K98VFXT](https://www.amazon.com/Seagate-ST18000NM000J-Internal-Surveillance-Supported/dp/B08K98VFXT)
For old school SATA with disc platters, 2TB is super old and small.
Here is a 22TB:
[https://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Exos-7200RPM-Enterprise-Drive/dp/B0C3B2MVLJ](https://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Exos-7200RPM-Enterprise-Drive/dp/B0C3B2MVLJ)
Look a little harder and you'll see there are plenty of 8TB consumer SSD's, even "cheap" QLC drives
Check [Kioxia](https://www.wiredzone.com/shop/product/10021310-kioxia-kcm6xrul30t7-hard-drive-cm6-30-72tb-nvme-pcie-4x4-2-5in-cm6-r-series-8134) drives if you wanna see some major terabytes
You just need to google and watch for sales on different sites. The Samsung 8tb is super expensive atm but it was dirt cheap a while back.
https://www.techradar.com/pro/hurry-up-samsung-high-capacity-8tb-ssd-falls-to-its-cheapest-price-ever-finally-a-big-drive-that-smashes-the-dollar40tb-barrier
Yes that is very common, though more and more people, myself included are just running ssd's now and forgetting the HDD altogether, but yes this is more expensive
It's the usual budget setup, and it's very viable. You should do that at the very least.
Just migrate your OS to an SSD, set your computer to boot through that SSD and you're good to go. You can still do this if you have a lot of data that you're unable to keep track of to be transferred.
Although, a clean installation is more desirable.
Yes. Do this.
However, you might want to consider getting a larger SSD, maybe 2tb? They aren’t very expensive and you may want to install certain games on it too. I would recommend an NVME, however, regular SSDs are still a very good (and cheaper) solution to your problem. Hope that helps you
Some games like Call Of Duty have a ton of textures that need to load when you launch the game. People with SSD for OS and HDD for games, often find that the game looks like a visual nightmare for the first few minutes. Running the game from an SSD usually resolves the issue for those users.
That would be much better than having Windows on an HDD. Just be sure you put nothing large on the SSD, it should have an absolute minimum of 25% free at all times or you'll kill it real fast
It would work, except it's likely your HDD is currently dying.
These days, SSDs are cheap enough that, personally, I'd advise to just go full SSD. Recent games, at least when they do open world streaming, tend to stutter on HDDs or have trouble loading in assets fast enough. HDDs should be relegated to archival storage only.
Absolutely, games will be a tad bit slower to load but that's it. An extra bit of info: your hard drive is an SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) hard drive, which means that every time you write files on it the drive has to partially overwrite any adjacent sector and then check everything at the end of the process to make sure that everything is correct. That's what's killing your OS performance, its constant reading and writing of small files stresses your drive much more than a conventional one. That's not a problem for video or game storage, since it's more of a "write and forget" kind of thing. So go ahead an treat yourself with an SSD, even a 2.5" SATA one if you want to save something, you won't regret it!
I just recently did that. I have a 2TB ssd and a 12 TB hdd in my rig right now. I really just use the 2TB for windows or for my “I’m never uninstalling this” games. Reason why is because when those games update, it downloads pretty quick with my 1TB internet but the read and write speeds on a hard drive are what takes a bulk of the time. So my most played go on my ssd. 70 gig update? “No problem. I’ll grab a drink and be on when I get back.” On my hdd? Give me a couple hours.
Absolutely. It’s a pretty common practice. My home setup has my OS and some commonly used apps/games in an NVMe drive. Less played games, infrequently used apps, and personal files live on my HDD or slower SSDs
Looking at the network traffic I'd speculate you are doing something that is writing to the disk which will usually cause 100%utilization especially on a hdd that is also the OS drive. Ssd will solve it like everyone else says.
"Can run" and "runs well" are very, very different things.
My laptop with a HDD ran agonizingly slow. When I added an SSD, it was like a brand new device.
Just going to [leave this here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PeS88O4rWB8) so you understand how much of your life you are wasting waiting on load times with a HDD.
> my load times are perfect
You have an extremely odd definition of "perfect", considering the evidence I just showed you.
Perfectly long to go make a sandwich while it loads? Perhaps. Meanwhile, the SSD has loaded the game in 3-10 seconds.
Borrow someone's laptop with either a gen 3 or gen 4 and start downloading the same game at the same time and I guarantee you will be shocked by the speed difference. But if you insist on sticking with old platter drives then I have over 100 sitting on a shelf from upgrading to ssd's for people.
Nobody's saying that they ***can't*** run it. 🤦 And no, defragmenting won't change much, that would only be true for until like 2018.
Hard drives are simply not fit to be used as a boot drive anymore, they're only *good* to be used as secondary storages nowadays. The vastly slow response time is the reason why he got 100% usage all the time.
Even the slowest SATA SSD available in the market is still considerably faster than any hard drives.
Defragmentation will change much that’s litterally the whole point in it wether it’s 2018 or now it will still take less time to read off of something that is in order
It's probably not failing, it's just that spinning hard disks are not suitable for running Windows 10 or above. You need someone to replace it with a semi-decent SSD.
try defragging it. for some reason, people automatically assume its shit or broken or something, its honestly baffling.. i guess lazy people just wanna take the easiest route since they like where their "logic" is taking them and dont want to have to stop to test if their beliefs fit reality lol.. talk about insecurity.. anyways;
open task manager as admin, click on processes then disks and see whats at the top of the list, also see if there's anything that mentions defragging. if not, open up the defrag and optimize drives app, select the hdd and click analyse. when thats done, click optimise. its can take a long process, patience is key here.
edit: in task manager if it does mention any defragging processes, just wait it out. it might take a while
You can defrag it all you want, a month old HDD isn't going to be fragmented enough to matter that much. Modern Windows simply is not designed to run on a HDD.
OP needs an SSD. It is not an optional piece of hardware in 2024.
Click on the Processes tab and sort by Disk usage. If that doesn't answer your question open Resource Monitor and dig deeper to find what processes and threads are doing the most reading and writing.
Know that if the hdd is not dying and you latelay switched it and kept the files it is fixable, I had made a guide here on reddit and posted it on a techsupport sub, but the mods banned me after I made it so there is no tutorial, but you can find the fix online (it took me days so good luck)
Edit: if you can't find it dm me, I have a link to the page that got it fixed for me
Oh that's a Seagate Barracuda! They're a great HDD for speed but the fact is, modern everything really kind of needs an SSD.
Those speeds are still *rough* though, I'd say either **very** fragmented files or the drive is failing/defective. It does also appear like Ethernet might be harassing the drive.
Test the drive with [CrystalDiskMark](https://crystalmark.info/en/software/crystaldiskmark/) and see if the results line up with what should be expected from the drive. If not, RMA it. I read you'd not long purchased the drive.
Seagate Barracuda Green drive. Junk drive. Seagates are terrible. Worst failure rate of any of the "big name" brands. They're trash. Also, mechanical hard drives are trash. I understand you recently bought this drive. What you're seeing there is the drive is likely to be defective, as it should be able to read/write at 100-150mb/s. You're not even 2% of that. Drive is trash. Seagate is trash. Get rid of it. Only use SSD. Solid state is the future. Mechanical drives should go extinct.
Seagate drives are as subject to failures as any other brand, it’s more a matter of luck than anything. I’ve had tens of terabytes of Seagate drives and the only one that died was after more than 10 years of heavy daily use as video encoding storage. If you need a lot of space for cheap HDDs are still the way to go, unless you are into video editing or you have some really SSD dependent software/games (i’m not talking about load times, but game breaking performance issues due to storage) you can buy a lot of space for your files without breaking the bank. An SSD is absolutely mandatory for a good OS experience though, even a 2.5 inch one is a massive upgrade, having Windows on HDD in 2024 is pure torture lol
[https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-2023/](https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-2023/)
Year after year, Backblaze releases their failure rates for drives.
Year after year, Seagate has a \*much\* higher failure rate than any other drive manufacturer.
Seagates are crap. Have been since I started building PC's in the 90's. Always have been. Always will be.
Data is data, and that’s ok, I totally agree that for mission critical data it’s better to go for the safest option, but for the average consumer failures are much less likely to happen and more related to bad handling of the drives, especially external ones. The 4TB model listed there is part of their consumer oriented catalog, a higher failure rate than server hardware has to be expected, and after an average age of 8 years and continuous use it’s more than acceptable to me. Seagate consumer drives are cheaper where I live, and since I have a good backup system in place I can totally accept a failure every few years, maybe I’m just pushing my luck but since I had never experienced catastrophic failures with my drives (Toshiba, WD, or else) or any loss of data I think I’ll keep choosing brands with my wallet. It’s just a matter of prevention, to know when drive sectors are starting to get reallocated and corrupted, any brand can fail when you don’t expect it to…
TL;DR: Keep it safe guys, DiskCheckup is your friend!
I hear you. As someone who's been fully exposed to Seagate for almost 3 decades, I speak from personal experience when I tell you that no drive manufacturer I've seen is more unreliable than Seagate. We all have different experiences, though.
It's kind of a lottery with this kind of things, i've seen a lot of WD Green drives fail on people i know, so for the same price i've always preferred the Seagate route (and got very lucky for more than 15 years). Now i have to hope that this luck doesn't turn against me all of a sudden!
You’re reading and writing MB/s of data to a hard drive. It’s as busy as it can possibly be.
What is doing this? Well you need to switch to the processes screen and sort by storage use or a similar metric.
Could be a virus scan or bitlocker encrypting your disk.
Your hard drive is fine. The 100% only shows that your HDD is being used 100% of the time, not that it is being used at max speed. The 100% is very misleading to what it means, nothing to worry about though.
Check process tab and sort by disk activity to see what the hdd is actually doing to determine whether or not it's faulty or whatever. You never know, it could just be some dumb software doing something in the background like an anti virus or Windows telemetry service collecting all the data in existence for no reason.
You can try turning everything off. All the background crap. when you invest in a ssd don’t cheap out. I have one that came in one of those eBay Optiplex it’s easily overwhelmed, I am so sick of it. Just get a decent one.
You use a hard drive, that's why. Hard drive's speed and especially the latency responses are vastly slower than even the slowest SATA SSD available in the market.
It's a common practice since like 2018 to switch your C drive which has your OS to be moved over to an SSD. You can still use your hard drive as a secondary storage.
Hard drives can't be optimally used as a boot drive anymore due to how complex the OS has becone.
Ffs ppl. It’s windows patch day. Every win 10 pc with a hdd is stuck on 100% for a few hours. Just leave it and it will be fine again…until the 2nd tues of next month
Maybe it runs a defragment or antivirus task in the background, the speed seems to low to be using that drive to 100%. An old 2TB HDD is not a wise choice as windows boot drive so a switch to an small ssd (128-256gb) ~ 15$ for windows should be the next step.
whether viruses or the dead hard drive, I would recommend you buy the SATA SSD and connect it to you computer and install to this SSD windows 10 or 11 (it will take 3-4 minutes), just rename your SSD to SSD on windows
It's just old. If your board has slots for them, upgrade to an nvme they are very affordable now and it's relatively painless to clone your hard drive onto.
If you don't have nvme slots, next best thing is a pcie ssd. Also fairly affordable.
If you don't have a free pcie slot, next best thing is a sata SSD, even more affordable.
Spinning platter disks are functionally obsolete as boot or installation drives. They can still be used for storage but they will severely hamper performance for any software installed on them especially your OS.
because HDDs are not recommended for windows 10. HDDs can't handle the many random reads and writes and they re pinned down by it.
Just normal OS functions can do that... it is recommended to have at least a SATA SSD for windows itself, otherwise the system will feel sluggish
HDDs are not good for anything active anymore... either the slow base transfer speed and huge files to be read... or lots of random reads and paralell reading...
OS, games or anything work related that moves lots of data needs an SSD nowadays.
That’s a dying hard drive. It’ll get worse and eventually fail entirely. But even in the odd chance it’s not dying, you should replace it with an ssd anyways. Pretty cheap nowadays and trust me it’ll be worth it (so much faster and more responsive)
HDD's haven't really been usable as OS drives since W8.
Windows especially 10 onwards, does a ton of background stuff like indexing that absolutely nukes spin drives it's practically unusable.
Get an SSD and put your OS on that and use the HDD for storage.
Did you just start up?
I have several PCs that run 100% Disk for the first 15 minutes or so. Even with SSDs. I looked up into it once and the best I could find is that it's a bug in Windows's startup that maxes disk for no reason for the first 15 minutes after a startup. It's been really annoying. But that was a long time ago and I couldn't verify anything so take with a grain of salt.
Had this happen to a 1year old SSD system drive recently, seatools fixed it... Another valid option would be to check if your system has been compromised with procexp64 and tcpview64 then run tron script if you're a beginner in virus/malware/etc... removal
My old hard river this and I was told it was a sign of it dying. Also I replaced it as my main drive ,ita been 12 years and that old ass drive is still kicking lol
Similar problem external hardrive 4tb HDD that i use to store videos,
i transferred a video to it and my hardrive became borderline useless it was like the picture above, always at 100% everytime i clicked on a folder it would take ages load or open ,
there were times where i had to leave the pc on 24hours for a change,
i managed to find the video and delete it after that the external hardrive HDD returned to work normally with no lag and could open folders and videos fast
I have no idea whats wrong do you think the video files (days after i encountered more videos that made the hardrive lag/slow) are corrupted ? or is the HDD dying
People living on it?
Joke :)
Usually start up items. Particularly, multiple virus checkers. Spyware scanners. Optimisation software. Old manufacturer bloatware. Start up quick launchers for PDF or office Software. Browser pre-caching. Browser plug-ins or notifications for websites. Old browser caches. Large amount of files on local discs. Icon problems. Image cache problems. Printer driver Software. Scanner software. Mobile phone sync software. Cellular dongle sync software. Chat programs.
Low ram.
Hard disk drive instead of ssd
Low disk space.
SSD instead of NVME.
Misconfigured DRAMLESS SSD or NVME
Misconfigured bios integrated graphics ram allocation.
Wrong version of windows.
Old upgraded installation.
Buggy security patches.
Microcode patches.
Disk or fan or GPU monitoring software.
Viruses, malware or trojans, back doors or rats.
That’s what came to mind as a small selection of possible things. The list is actually a lot larger, as in, thousands of items!
I looked at the screenshot.
You are downloading at about 10 MBit a second.
What that means is something is using quite a bit of Internet. It could be some email synchronising, some windows updates, some virus checker updates or something similar, but it’s more likely to be steam.
I’m guessing your game library is updating.
Even on a modern computer, I tend to not let steam run, or any other computer game Library. It means that when I want to play a game, they have to update, but it also means that I can selectively update only the game I want to play, and update only on days when I know I don’t need performance.
You might want to check if you have any torrent software or other peer to peer software running. Even windows update can be configured as P2P, however you have no uplink saturation so in this instance you’re only downloading. That fits with steam.
I’m not sure what the other icon is in the bottom right corner, but they usually used to call, the system tray.
That’s a new one, the one with the circles. If steam is up-to-date, it might be that.
I’ve optimised countless computers like this. With and without replacing hardware.
What do you have to do is ensure absolutely nothing runs at start up. Going into the browser and make sure the browser doesn’t preload as well, you might have to do that individually for multiple browsers. Delete as many steam games as you can, try to have only one or two installed at a time and remove the old one before moving onto a new one.
Other things you can do include optimising bios settings. Even though there is a GPU, the integrated graphics might still be using quite a lot of system ram. Actually, I checked your ram. That’s not your bottleneck, but you might still have some bios settings slowing the system. There is an art to adjusting bios settings. You need to be extremely skilled to get the best performance. Sometimes you can do it in software from the operating system, but it tends to be less reliable, and uses a whole variety of different manufacturer and third-party programs and can take hours to get working if you’re unsure about which program goes with that system board.
What you can try is Software that caches that hard drive.
Windows does a pretty good job, but Romex software make a program which would work well with the amount of ram you have. It is called ‘Primocache’.
See https://www.romexsoftware.com/en-us/primo-cache/index.html
It’s an example of a category of programs that can address your issue, to differing levels. There is a trial, and it does auto configure. If you email the software authors, they do respond with assistance, but you can probably work it out if you study the instructions closely in the app and on the website. I didn’t reach out to them for help until after I had paid for it, in my case, I bought it to reduce wear, but particularly, to help cache Blockchain Cryptography stores, bitcoin core primarily, so I can leave them on an old hard drive.
The truth is though, unless you know exactly what you’re doing, upgrading the hardware is the best option. In my case, I didn’t want to upgrade the hardware. My system is very functional and reliable. It’s simply that a slow hard disk drive makes some software buggy. And when you have enough RAM, using a third-party cache manager helps, particularly as you have fine grain configuration options that windows is lacking.
Try buying a new 2TB also don't run your system from a drive you put storage on. I usually do a SSD for a systems only drive and then TBs for storage. Replace every 5-7-10 years depending on the drive
Because it’s a hard disk with a spinning platter, having to read and handle every little background task. Should definitely replace it with an SSD, keep it as a spare and maybe get an enclosure for it to use it via USB? Unless it’s a 3.5 inch, then maybe a dock for it.
Mixture of Networking Usage Can Cause The system Process To Max Out Any Drive (including SSD) on low read/write speeds. I see system taking 100% of my M.2 SSD or physical SSD just for transferring .50 MB/s
I had a similar issue with an ssd where I had to change a registry key to disable a type of error reporting that caused it to trip over the error constantly instead of utilizing the drives real capability. Sadly I didn't save the instructions, but some googling might find a solution for you.
Because your disk is one or more of the following:
A) Super Old
B) Damaged
C) Cheap Crap
Most common is B, get an SSD your operating speed will double.
Try defragmenting and optimizing the drive. It should fix the issue.
Of course, worst case scenario, if this doesn’t work, then your hard drive may die soon.
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Probably an old hard drive that can't keep up with being the main drive anymore
100% usage at 4mbps read and 2mbps write..... Good God I'm pretty sure a 5400rpm hdd can beat those speeds
They can but the issue is the type of work. They aren't reading/writing large consistent files. Instead it's a lot of random small files. So constantly is having to change what and where it is accessing files.
it is the main drive
Or spyware or benign virus that just monitors things? (Aka fkin Facebook)
Nah honestly hard drives really struggle with being the OS drive on Windows 10 and 11 now
Goodluck getting windows 11 to accept the hardware in the first place if it has any age to it
Yeah I had to skirt around the hardware checks cause it kept thinking I didn't have secure boot on my motherboard even though it was enabled
I understand why they did it but I still hate it
That was the same symptom my dying HDD had.
Same, just a week ago my hard drive died for the first time. It was at 100% usage all the time, but it wasn’t reading or writing. Rip OP
How many times it die after that?
not much
Usually just once
First and last time :(
100% load for a hdd with an os is normal. 100% load with throughput means it’s probably not faulty. It’s 2024. Get an ssd.
With such a low read and write transfer speed, Windows is likely trying to interact with a crap ton of files, and old school mechanical arm drives just don't do well in that arena. SSD drives have no moving parts in them, they can sometimes breathe life into an older computer. 2TB isn't really that impressive even for storage these days, with 18TB single drives out there. Best to see if someone can clone the data from your existing drive, at least into a SATA SSD, if your system doesn't have an m.2 slot. It will legit be better than new
18...?like eighteen? Terrabytes??? 18000gb??
100TB if you have $40k https://nimbusdata.com/docs/ExaDrive-DC-Datasheet.pdf
[https://www.amazon.com/Seagate-ST18000NM000J-Internal-Surveillance-Supported/dp/B08K98VFXT](https://www.amazon.com/Seagate-ST18000NM000J-Internal-Surveillance-Supported/dp/B08K98VFXT) For old school SATA with disc platters, 2TB is super old and small. Here is a 22TB: [https://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Exos-7200RPM-Enterprise-Drive/dp/B0C3B2MVLJ](https://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Exos-7200RPM-Enterprise-Drive/dp/B0C3B2MVLJ)
Are you talking about internal SSD drives thats 18tb if so hook me up on the website I’ve only seen 4tb unless I’m confused sorry
Look a little harder and you'll see there are plenty of 8TB consumer SSD's, even "cheap" QLC drives Check [Kioxia](https://www.wiredzone.com/shop/product/10021310-kioxia-kcm6xrul30t7-hard-drive-cm6-30-72tb-nvme-pcie-4x4-2-5in-cm6-r-series-8134) drives if you wanna see some major terabytes
3 grand. Wow so cheap!!!
I got an 8tb ssd for like $200....
Where, where? INEEEEDITTT 😂 for my games lol
You just need to google and watch for sales on different sites. The Samsung 8tb is super expensive atm but it was dirt cheap a while back. https://www.techradar.com/pro/hurry-up-samsung-high-capacity-8tb-ssd-falls-to-its-cheapest-price-ever-finally-a-big-drive-that-smashes-the-dollar40tb-barrier
You need an SSD homie.
Swap HDD by SSD
Question if a get a 500gb ssd to hold windows and then use the hdd to hold games will that work?
Yes that is very common, though more and more people, myself included are just running ssd's now and forgetting the HDD altogether, but yes this is more expensive
agreed. IF YOU CAN, an NVME SSD for Operating System and cornerstone apps, then a regular SATA SSD for games, files etc.
It's the usual budget setup, and it's very viable. You should do that at the very least. Just migrate your OS to an SSD, set your computer to boot through that SSD and you're good to go. You can still do this if you have a lot of data that you're unable to keep track of to be transferred. Although, a clean installation is more desirable.
Yes. Do this. However, you might want to consider getting a larger SSD, maybe 2tb? They aren’t very expensive and you may want to install certain games on it too. I would recommend an NVME, however, regular SSDs are still a very good (and cheaper) solution to your problem. Hope that helps you
By regular he means SATA ssds, if anyone is wondering
Games on hdd will load very slowly, just get 2 ssds if you can or a 1/2tb ssd
Some games like Call Of Duty have a ton of textures that need to load when you launch the game. People with SSD for OS and HDD for games, often find that the game looks like a visual nightmare for the first few minutes. Running the game from an SSD usually resolves the issue for those users.
That would be much better than having Windows on an HDD. Just be sure you put nothing large on the SSD, it should have an absolute minimum of 25% free at all times or you'll kill it real fast
It would work, except it's likely your HDD is currently dying. These days, SSDs are cheap enough that, personally, I'd advise to just go full SSD. Recent games, at least when they do open world streaming, tend to stutter on HDDs or have trouble loading in assets fast enough. HDDs should be relegated to archival storage only.
Yes, but you need to do a clean reinstall.
Yes, but you need to do a clean reinstall.
Depends on the games. Modern games are starting to require SSDs. Old games would be fine.
Absolutely, games will be a tad bit slower to load but that's it. An extra bit of info: your hard drive is an SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) hard drive, which means that every time you write files on it the drive has to partially overwrite any adjacent sector and then check everything at the end of the process to make sure that everything is correct. That's what's killing your OS performance, its constant reading and writing of small files stresses your drive much more than a conventional one. That's not a problem for video or game storage, since it's more of a "write and forget" kind of thing. So go ahead an treat yourself with an SSD, even a 2.5" SATA one if you want to save something, you won't regret it!
I just recently did that. I have a 2TB ssd and a 12 TB hdd in my rig right now. I really just use the 2TB for windows or for my “I’m never uninstalling this” games. Reason why is because when those games update, it downloads pretty quick with my 1TB internet but the read and write speeds on a hard drive are what takes a bulk of the time. So my most played go on my ssd. 70 gig update? “No problem. I’ll grab a drink and be on when I get back.” On my hdd? Give me a couple hours.
Absolutely. It’s a pretty common practice. My home setup has my OS and some commonly used apps/games in an NVMe drive. Less played games, infrequently used apps, and personal files live on my HDD or slower SSDs
the disk be disking
Because it's a spinny
Looking at the network traffic I'd speculate you are doing something that is writing to the disk which will usually cause 100%utilization especially on a hdd that is also the OS drive. Ssd will solve it like everyone else says.
Because any thing running windows 10 + should have a ssd boot drive hdd are FAR to slow
Not really though windows 10 can run on a hdd and they can be fast enough if defragmentated
"Can run" and "runs well" are very, very different things. My laptop with a HDD ran agonizingly slow. When I added an SSD, it was like a brand new device.
My pc with hdd runs perfectly fine off of a HDD
And it would run 4-10x faster with an SSD. It's a night and day difference.
Well that’s 4-10x overkill my HDD runs fast enough for games with decent load times
Just going to [leave this here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PeS88O4rWB8) so you understand how much of your life you are wasting waiting on load times with a HDD.
I’m not waisting tiem though I jsut explained thsi my load times are perfect
> my load times are perfect You have an extremely odd definition of "perfect", considering the evidence I just showed you. Perfectly long to go make a sandwich while it loads? Perhaps. Meanwhile, the SSD has loaded the game in 3-10 seconds.
My games take that time to load
Yea but it takes like 7 hours to load
It doesn’t take ages mine runs fine on HDD
Have you ever had a ssd tue difference is like a full 2 minutes
I don’t think you can have negative load times
Borrow someone's laptop with either a gen 3 or gen 4 and start downloading the same game at the same time and I guarantee you will be shocked by the speed difference. But if you insist on sticking with old platter drives then I have over 100 sitting on a shelf from upgrading to ssd's for people.
If your paying postage
Nobody's saying that they ***can't*** run it. 🤦 And no, defragmenting won't change much, that would only be true for until like 2018. Hard drives are simply not fit to be used as a boot drive anymore, they're only *good* to be used as secondary storages nowadays. The vastly slow response time is the reason why he got 100% usage all the time. Even the slowest SATA SSD available in the market is still considerably faster than any hard drives.
Defragmentation will change much that’s litterally the whole point in it wether it’s 2018 or now it will still take less time to read off of something that is in order
Not if the disk is used as a boot drive.
Yes mine is I don’t user SSD
Is it running optimally? Doubt it. Bet that you had to wait for many delays.
No I barely find myself waiting for any sort of delay lol times are as good as they can be
Ah, I see that you never experienced full blown system that's bolstered with an nvme.
I don’t think I’ve ever really felt the need but my drive doesn’t run at 100% all the time like this guys
Its probably dying unless its actually doing something. You have ethernet and cpu activity too
It's probably not failing, it's just that spinning hard disks are not suitable for running Windows 10 or above. You need someone to replace it with a semi-decent SSD.
I've been reading the comments and I bought this like a month ago how long until it dies?
Its just that its slow, nothing else, get an NVME if you can
So was this a new HD going into an old PC, or was this a new build of Windows on this HD just a month or so ago ?
Why did you buy a HDD is the real question? SSDs are much faster and cheap.
Is this the drive your Windows is on? If so that needs to change. Your boot drive should NOT be an HDD, they're simply not fast enough for that
try defragging it. for some reason, people automatically assume its shit or broken or something, its honestly baffling.. i guess lazy people just wanna take the easiest route since they like where their "logic" is taking them and dont want to have to stop to test if their beliefs fit reality lol.. talk about insecurity.. anyways; open task manager as admin, click on processes then disks and see whats at the top of the list, also see if there's anything that mentions defragging. if not, open up the defrag and optimize drives app, select the hdd and click analyse. when thats done, click optimise. its can take a long process, patience is key here. edit: in task manager if it does mention any defragging processes, just wait it out. it might take a while
You can defrag it all you want, a month old HDD isn't going to be fragmented enough to matter that much. Modern Windows simply is not designed to run on a HDD. OP needs an SSD. It is not an optional piece of hardware in 2024.
Meanwhile modern windows has an automatic defrag schedule set for SSDs effectively shortening their lifespan for no benefit.
They can tell between HDD and SSD and will trim not defrag SSDs which actually extends lifespan
That would only be true for until like 2018. Not anymore, though.
This was happening to me. Bought a new one and cloned the old one to it. Works perfect now.
Your hard drive is kicking the bucket, only a matter of time till it poops, just buy a new one and transfer all the data from it
Click on the Processes tab and sort by Disk usage. If that doesn't answer your question open Resource Monitor and dig deeper to find what processes and threads are doing the most reading and writing.
You got stuxnetted
Know that if the hdd is not dying and you latelay switched it and kept the files it is fixable, I had made a guide here on reddit and posted it on a techsupport sub, but the mods banned me after I made it so there is no tutorial, but you can find the fix online (it took me days so good luck) Edit: if you can't find it dm me, I have a link to the page that got it fixed for me
Oh that's a Seagate Barracuda! They're a great HDD for speed but the fact is, modern everything really kind of needs an SSD. Those speeds are still *rough* though, I'd say either **very** fragmented files or the drive is failing/defective. It does also appear like Ethernet might be harassing the drive. Test the drive with [CrystalDiskMark](https://crystalmark.info/en/software/crystaldiskmark/) and see if the results line up with what should be expected from the drive. If not, RMA it. I read you'd not long purchased the drive.
Check this video out and do the needful. https://youtu.be/e3kYlLbk20I?si=a9lqHru-yzCojjP7
Share a screenshot of the processes tab, please.
Seagate Barracuda Green drive. Junk drive. Seagates are terrible. Worst failure rate of any of the "big name" brands. They're trash. Also, mechanical hard drives are trash. I understand you recently bought this drive. What you're seeing there is the drive is likely to be defective, as it should be able to read/write at 100-150mb/s. You're not even 2% of that. Drive is trash. Seagate is trash. Get rid of it. Only use SSD. Solid state is the future. Mechanical drives should go extinct.
Seagate drives are as subject to failures as any other brand, it’s more a matter of luck than anything. I’ve had tens of terabytes of Seagate drives and the only one that died was after more than 10 years of heavy daily use as video encoding storage. If you need a lot of space for cheap HDDs are still the way to go, unless you are into video editing or you have some really SSD dependent software/games (i’m not talking about load times, but game breaking performance issues due to storage) you can buy a lot of space for your files without breaking the bank. An SSD is absolutely mandatory for a good OS experience though, even a 2.5 inch one is a massive upgrade, having Windows on HDD in 2024 is pure torture lol
[https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-2023/](https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-2023/) Year after year, Backblaze releases their failure rates for drives. Year after year, Seagate has a \*much\* higher failure rate than any other drive manufacturer. Seagates are crap. Have been since I started building PC's in the 90's. Always have been. Always will be.
Data is data, and that’s ok, I totally agree that for mission critical data it’s better to go for the safest option, but for the average consumer failures are much less likely to happen and more related to bad handling of the drives, especially external ones. The 4TB model listed there is part of their consumer oriented catalog, a higher failure rate than server hardware has to be expected, and after an average age of 8 years and continuous use it’s more than acceptable to me. Seagate consumer drives are cheaper where I live, and since I have a good backup system in place I can totally accept a failure every few years, maybe I’m just pushing my luck but since I had never experienced catastrophic failures with my drives (Toshiba, WD, or else) or any loss of data I think I’ll keep choosing brands with my wallet. It’s just a matter of prevention, to know when drive sectors are starting to get reallocated and corrupted, any brand can fail when you don’t expect it to… TL;DR: Keep it safe guys, DiskCheckup is your friend!
I hear you. As someone who's been fully exposed to Seagate for almost 3 decades, I speak from personal experience when I tell you that no drive manufacturer I've seen is more unreliable than Seagate. We all have different experiences, though.
It's kind of a lottery with this kind of things, i've seen a lot of WD Green drives fail on people i know, so for the same price i've always preferred the Seagate route (and got very lucky for more than 15 years). Now i have to hope that this luck doesn't turn against me all of a sudden!
You’re reading and writing MB/s of data to a hard drive. It’s as busy as it can possibly be. What is doing this? Well you need to switch to the processes screen and sort by storage use or a similar metric. Could be a virus scan or bitlocker encrypting your disk.
Your hard drive is fine. The 100% only shows that your HDD is being used 100% of the time, not that it is being used at max speed. The 100% is very misleading to what it means, nothing to worry about though.
Look in processes for what is using the disk so much. Maybe it's an agressive AV doing a million little scans.
Check process tab and sort by disk activity to see what the hdd is actually doing to determine whether or not it's faulty or whatever. You never know, it could just be some dumb software doing something in the background like an anti virus or Windows telemetry service collecting all the data in existence for no reason.
You can try turning everything off. All the background crap. when you invest in a ssd don’t cheap out. I have one that came in one of those eBay Optiplex it’s easily overwhelmed, I am so sick of it. Just get a decent one.
nvm what I said was wrong, he's seeing the 100% active time, meaning he only has one drive.
You use a hard drive, that's why. Hard drive's speed and especially the latency responses are vastly slower than even the slowest SATA SSD available in the market. It's a common practice since like 2018 to switch your C drive which has your OS to be moved over to an SSD. You can still use your hard drive as a secondary storage. Hard drives can't be optimally used as a boot drive anymore due to how complex the OS has becone.
Probably dying, I'd suggest backing all your important data up and putting it on a new hdd or ssd.
Time to take your pills gramps, hdds aren't what they used to be.
Ffs ppl. It’s windows patch day. Every win 10 pc with a hdd is stuck on 100% for a few hours. Just leave it and it will be fine again…until the 2nd tues of next month
How old is this hard drive? Also, why is your boot drive an HDD instead of an SSD?
Maybe it runs a defragment or antivirus task in the background, the speed seems to low to be using that drive to 100%. An old 2TB HDD is not a wise choice as windows boot drive so a switch to an small ssd (128-256gb) ~ 15$ for windows should be the next step.
SSDs aren’t that spendy anymore. It would be a huge and noticeable upgrade if you’re on an hdd.
I reckon might be time to back up some important info if you have any on there
whether viruses or the dead hard drive, I would recommend you buy the SATA SSD and connect it to you computer and install to this SSD windows 10 or 11 (it will take 3-4 minutes), just rename your SSD to SSD on windows
Do you happen to use McAfee lol
Hell no
It's just old. If your board has slots for them, upgrade to an nvme they are very affordable now and it's relatively painless to clone your hard drive onto. If you don't have nvme slots, next best thing is a pcie ssd. Also fairly affordable. If you don't have a free pcie slot, next best thing is a sata SSD, even more affordable. Spinning platter disks are functionally obsolete as boot or installation drives. They can still be used for storage but they will severely hamper performance for any software installed on them especially your OS.
That's an HDD my man, win 10/11 will max them out 100% of the time, even at idle. You've got 2 options: win 7/xp or a 10€ 120GB sata SSD
HDD had enough
HD switch to an SSD
Why do you have 24 gb of ram?
It says HDD, there's your answer
because HDDs are not recommended for windows 10. HDDs can't handle the many random reads and writes and they re pinned down by it. Just normal OS functions can do that... it is recommended to have at least a SATA SSD for windows itself, otherwise the system will feel sluggish HDDs are not good for anything active anymore... either the slow base transfer speed and huge files to be read... or lots of random reads and paralell reading... OS, games or anything work related that moves lots of data needs an SSD nowadays.
HDD
Is your drive encrypting through bitlicker?
That’s a dying hard drive. It’ll get worse and eventually fail entirely. But even in the odd chance it’s not dying, you should replace it with an ssd anyways. Pretty cheap nowadays and trust me it’ll be worth it (so much faster and more responsive)
HDD's haven't really been usable as OS drives since W8. Windows especially 10 onwards, does a ton of background stuff like indexing that absolutely nukes spin drives it's practically unusable. Get an SSD and put your OS on that and use the HDD for storage.
Maybe "defrag" can help
Check using resource monitor and look at what's using hdd all the time, sort by most read/writes/s
Try cleaning out your winsxs cache with dism and then run windows update a few times
Probably dying🤔
Open it up and it's a scrawny heaving gray haired mouse running on a plate to keep it spinning. Give that old guy a break.
Check Wich process is consuming the biggest % in disk, then you could say if it's either virus, Os malfunction, HDD dying, or anything else
Get an SSD and see ur computer go brrr lol
Did you just start up? I have several PCs that run 100% Disk for the first 15 minutes or so. Even with SSDs. I looked up into it once and the best I could find is that it's a bug in Windows's startup that maxes disk for no reason for the first 15 minutes after a startup. It's been really annoying. But that was a long time ago and I couldn't verify anything so take with a grain of salt.
Cuz it’s an hdd, get an ssd, or a few ssds
SSD’s are so cheap these days you can get a dedicated 500gb SSD for around $30 for your operating system and just use that HDD for storage.
Had this happen to a 1year old SSD system drive recently, seatools fixed it... Another valid option would be to check if your system has been compromised with procexp64 and tcpview64 then run tron script if you're a beginner in virus/malware/etc... removal
I am now tired of people asking this on Reddit for the 21092876th times just because they are running their os on hdd
It's doin stuff
My old hard river this and I was told it was a sign of it dying. Also I replaced it as my main drive ,ita been 12 years and that old ass drive is still kicking lol
Similar problem external hardrive 4tb HDD that i use to store videos, i transferred a video to it and my hardrive became borderline useless it was like the picture above, always at 100% everytime i clicked on a folder it would take ages load or open , there were times where i had to leave the pc on 24hours for a change, i managed to find the video and delete it after that the external hardrive HDD returned to work normally with no lag and could open folders and videos fast I have no idea whats wrong do you think the video files (days after i encountered more videos that made the hardrive lag/slow) are corrupted ? or is the HDD dying
"I'm tired, boss" -This guys hard drive probably
People living on it? Joke :) Usually start up items. Particularly, multiple virus checkers. Spyware scanners. Optimisation software. Old manufacturer bloatware. Start up quick launchers for PDF or office Software. Browser pre-caching. Browser plug-ins or notifications for websites. Old browser caches. Large amount of files on local discs. Icon problems. Image cache problems. Printer driver Software. Scanner software. Mobile phone sync software. Cellular dongle sync software. Chat programs. Low ram. Hard disk drive instead of ssd Low disk space. SSD instead of NVME. Misconfigured DRAMLESS SSD or NVME Misconfigured bios integrated graphics ram allocation. Wrong version of windows. Old upgraded installation. Buggy security patches. Microcode patches. Disk or fan or GPU monitoring software. Viruses, malware or trojans, back doors or rats. That’s what came to mind as a small selection of possible things. The list is actually a lot larger, as in, thousands of items! I looked at the screenshot. You are downloading at about 10 MBit a second. What that means is something is using quite a bit of Internet. It could be some email synchronising, some windows updates, some virus checker updates or something similar, but it’s more likely to be steam. I’m guessing your game library is updating. Even on a modern computer, I tend to not let steam run, or any other computer game Library. It means that when I want to play a game, they have to update, but it also means that I can selectively update only the game I want to play, and update only on days when I know I don’t need performance. You might want to check if you have any torrent software or other peer to peer software running. Even windows update can be configured as P2P, however you have no uplink saturation so in this instance you’re only downloading. That fits with steam. I’m not sure what the other icon is in the bottom right corner, but they usually used to call, the system tray. That’s a new one, the one with the circles. If steam is up-to-date, it might be that. I’ve optimised countless computers like this. With and without replacing hardware. What do you have to do is ensure absolutely nothing runs at start up. Going into the browser and make sure the browser doesn’t preload as well, you might have to do that individually for multiple browsers. Delete as many steam games as you can, try to have only one or two installed at a time and remove the old one before moving onto a new one. Other things you can do include optimising bios settings. Even though there is a GPU, the integrated graphics might still be using quite a lot of system ram. Actually, I checked your ram. That’s not your bottleneck, but you might still have some bios settings slowing the system. There is an art to adjusting bios settings. You need to be extremely skilled to get the best performance. Sometimes you can do it in software from the operating system, but it tends to be less reliable, and uses a whole variety of different manufacturer and third-party programs and can take hours to get working if you’re unsure about which program goes with that system board. What you can try is Software that caches that hard drive. Windows does a pretty good job, but Romex software make a program which would work well with the amount of ram you have. It is called ‘Primocache’. See https://www.romexsoftware.com/en-us/primo-cache/index.html It’s an example of a category of programs that can address your issue, to differing levels. There is a trial, and it does auto configure. If you email the software authors, they do respond with assistance, but you can probably work it out if you study the instructions closely in the app and on the website. I didn’t reach out to them for help until after I had paid for it, in my case, I bought it to reduce wear, but particularly, to help cache Blockchain Cryptography stores, bitcoin core primarily, so I can leave them on an old hard drive. The truth is though, unless you know exactly what you’re doing, upgrading the hardware is the best option. In my case, I didn’t want to upgrade the hardware. My system is very functional and reliable. It’s simply that a slow hard disk drive makes some software buggy. And when you have enough RAM, using a third-party cache manager helps, particularly as you have fine grain configuration options that windows is lacking.
Your HDD speed tells you either the drive is about to fail or on its dying breath. Its time to get a 2tb SSD in its place.
Yo storage is kaput
Your HDD is cooked
Stop stealing HDDs from your grand dad. That's ancient and broken technology - you need to backup data and replace it.
Garbage ass Seagate?
Try buying a new 2TB also don't run your system from a drive you put storage on. I usually do a SSD for a systems only drive and then TBs for storage. Replace every 5-7-10 years depending on the drive
You pay for the disk, you can use the 100% of them XD
Time to replace it. Get an SSD this time.
Your HDD is probably old / dying, or your computer is demanding too much (HDD is a bottleneck). Get an SSD!
Sounds like you're trying to run windows 11 on a potato with an HDD
Clone the HDD to an SSD and move on!
Old or defective hard drive
why cant people just google this common issue instead of making a new post every month. You have windows installed on a harddrive, dont do that.
I see this question- and the picture- and immediately think Windows Update.
Install crystaldiskinfo and check your drive health
What about replacing your hdd with an SSD
Perhaps some connector is broken or there is an error in the drivers and your PC cannot assess the condition of the disk
Time to upgrade
Check the processes tab, sort it by disk usage column, and see what process(es) is causing the disk usage. My money’s on a virus scanner doing its job
HDD probably collecting an update from windows , switch to ssd main local disk and use a HDD just for cheaper storage
Cause you working it too hard, brah!
I had the same problem, Just got an SSD fixed it
because you have a HDD
Buy a new drive and back up all your stuff and possibly OS on there for when it dies soon.
It’s ready to retire.
Used to have the same problem. For me it was a corrupted drive and all I could do was just replace it. Easy fix just a pain in the ass
HDD are slow af. ssds even on the slowest end will always beat an hdd
You are on a hard drive. Simple answer Get an ssd. But the speeds are awful, i would run a sfc scan to be safe
Old lazy drive. Replace with ssd.
Because it’s a hard disk with a spinning platter, having to read and handle every little background task. Should definitely replace it with an SSD, keep it as a spare and maybe get an enclosure for it to use it via USB? Unless it’s a 3.5 inch, then maybe a dock for it.
Because its not a Mac lol
Mixture of Networking Usage Can Cause The system Process To Max Out Any Drive (including SSD) on low read/write speeds. I see system taking 100% of my M.2 SSD or physical SSD just for transferring .50 MB/s
Invest in an SSD
Process tab will show you what application or service is eating up resources.
I had a similar issue with an ssd where I had to change a registry key to disable a type of error reporting that caused it to trip over the error constantly instead of utilizing the drives real capability. Sadly I didn't save the instructions, but some googling might find a solution for you.
Because your disk is one or more of the following: A) Super Old B) Damaged C) Cheap Crap Most common is B, get an SSD your operating speed will double.
It may be a virus
Because its a fucking hard drive from 1890 BC
It's new
The drive may be new but the technology isnt
Back up yer stuffs and replace drive with an ssd before it goes night night.
Disable the optional service Sysmain. It'll stop that 100% thing.
Because you have a god awful Seagate HDD
F
Try defragmenting and optimizing the drive. It should fix the issue. Of course, worst case scenario, if this doesn’t work, then your hard drive may die soon.
\*Looks around at all the armchair "techs"\* \*Promptly exits the thread\* lol
Your hard drive is likely failing