Windows 10: disk drive usage every second when idle

Alright so here's a super weird one for you guys, hopefully someone can help me because it's driving me wild.

I have a harddrive dedicated solely for games, the G: drive, which is a chonky 6TB WD Black. It is easily audible when being written to, which is both annoying, because it's certainly louder than ambient fan noise, but also useful because if my pc starts to do anything like update a game in the background, i instantly know because i can literally hear it happening.

However, in the last few days, the G: drive now makes it's activity writing noise continuously and repeatedly. The kicker? nothing is being written. It reports no activity whatsoever in task manager, which seems right to me because nothing exists on the drive other than games which obviously aren't running if the pc is idle.

i've had this drive in my system for probably near 4 years now and this is a very recent thing, it's started happening in the last few days, i've used WD's software to do a check on the drives "health", and chkdsk found no errors.

The only things that stick out to me is how the sound coming from the drive indicating activity, is occurring exactly every second perfectly in time with how often the graphs in task manager/resource manager are updating so maybe something somewhere is writing to a log file? (which seems weird because this sort of thing shouldn't be a sudden change. why now after 4 years is it doing this? not sure about this one).

The drive activity also completely stops when i boot into safemode, which makes me think it's likely a piece of software on my pc doing this. The weird thing here is, i haven't downloaded/installed anything manually in weeks and the only things that even touch this drive are games downloaded through their respective launchers - steam/uplay etc.

I've tried uninstalling the only 2 recent windows updates/patches i've had recently. Considering this drive only has games on it (besides the usual hidden windows volume information stuff) this seemed like it would be a stretch of a solution but you never know. It didn't help anyway.

I've tried closing all my running programs which again seemed like a stretch because the only executable programs on the drive are games, and if the pc is idle then... obviously i'm not running a game.

I think i've covered all bases here and done the "usual" checks, though the fact that it doesn't happen in safemode makes me thinks it's a running service... but then, nothing on my system has changed recently that i'm aware of anyway...

so uh, any further suggestions?

submitted by /u/xX_420edgelord69_Xx
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:)

 

Constant 100% Disk Usage, 60-80% CPU usage. Both happen when idle.

Could you also provide a snapshot of Resource Monitor with selected Disk Activity Tab and checked only System:

i would also suggest running checkdisk and sfc /scannow

 

Windows 10 100% disk usage problem

Hi Jae,

Thank you for responding.

I suggest you to try the below steps and check if it helps.

Step 1: First of all, take a note of the processes or applications that is running when the computer runs with high disk usage. Also, we need to find the applications that are running at startup.

Follow the steps to check for the processes under Task Manager:

• Press Ctrl+Shift+Esc to open Task Manager.
  
• Click on Processes tab. Check if any of the processes consumes high memory usage.

Bad sectors on the hard drive can be a cause for high disk usage.

Check which process is utilizing the Hard Disk on Windows 8.1, you may try the following steps.

• Open Task Manager and click on
  Details tab.
• Right click the columns headers and click "Select Columns".
• From the "Select Columns" window, check: I/O Reads, I/O Writes, I/O read bytes, I/O write bytes and then click
  OK.
• Now the columns will be added to the view and will display how much each process is utilizing from the hard disk.
• Sort by I/O read bytes or I/O write bytes by clicking on the column header to see which process is utilizing the Hard Drive most.

Step 2: If you have not run the 'check disk' scan or tried optimizing the drive, follow the steps from this article.

Improve performance by optimizing your drive

(Note: This applies to Windows 10 also.)

Important: While performing check disk on the hard drive, if any bad sectors are found on the hard drive, it tries to repair that sector and any data available on that might be lost.

Hope it helps. Feel free to get back to us for any further queries or issues related to Windows Operating System, we will be happy to help you.

Thank you.

 

Windows 10 100% Disk Usage on startup.

Hi,

Thank you for responding.

I suggest you to try the below steps and check if it helps.

Step 1: First of all, take a note of the processes or applications that is running when the computer runs with high disk usage. Also, we need to find the applications that are running at startup.

Follow the steps to check for the processes under Task Manager:

• Press Ctrl+Shift+Esc to open Task Manager.
  
• Click on Processes tab. Check if any of the processes consumes high memory usage.

Bad sectors on the hard drive can be a cause for high disk usage.

Check which process is utilizing the Hard Disk on Windows 8.1, you may try the following steps.

• Open Task Manager and click on
  Details tab.
• Right click the columns headers and click "Select Columns".
• From the "Select Columns" window, check: I/O Reads, I/O Writes, I/O read bytes, I/O write bytes and then click
  OK.
• Now the columns will be added to the view and will display how much each process is utilizing from the hard disk.
• Sort by I/O read bytes or I/O write bytes by clicking on the column header to see which process is utilizing the Hard Drive most.

Step 2: If you have not run the 'check disk' scan or tried optimizing the drive, follow the steps from this article.

Improve performance by optimizing your drive

(Note: This applies to Windows 10 also.)

Important: While performing check disk on the hard drive, if any bad sectors are found on the hard drive, it tries to repair that sector and any data available on that might be lost.

Hope it helps. Feel free to get back to us for any further queries or issues related to Windows Operating System, we will be happy to help you.