Windows 10: Does a broken hard drive cause 100% disk usage?

Recently, my computer has a lot of random spikes to 100% for disk usage and I’ve already tried everything I could find online to fix it. I ran the Crystal Disk info and it told me i had 127 uncorrectable sectors and 44 pending. I also occasionally hear clicking sounds from my HDD. Is it time for me to replace my HDD?

:)

 

100% Disk Usage on Secondary Hard Drive

At the moment, I'm trying Method 2, but it causes 100% usage just by attempting to read it. According to Task Manager, it is the utilizes the hard drive the most on I/O read bytes, but this Chrome window uses the most on I/O write bytes (I have it installed
on my SSD, so I doubt it should be causing anything in the other hard drives.).

I had to close the first instance because it didn't respond when I chose to scan the drive. As of right now, it has not made any progress and the hard drive is at 100% usage.

Does the amount of files on the disk affect how it is read as well? I recently bought this hard drive new and have very little files on it.

Edit: It apparently decided to switch to my main C: drive instead of going to the hard drive. I'm going to retry with a full system scan.

It hit a spike when it started scanning C:\Windows\syswow64\Spoonuninstall.exe right now. There is 0 kb read/write on the hard drive that is hitting 100% usage.

Final Edit:

I found that when I formatted the drive partition, it started running properly again. I tested out the Dolphin emulator as well as other games on it and it never peaked at 100%. It seems that something on the disk was causing the peaks, but what exactly
I couldn't find out. It may have been a file corrupted as I copied over the games from my smaller hard drive or something else. Either way, it seems the problem is gone so far.

 

how to determine what's causing 100% disk usage

Considering your 2nd screenshot, assuming your Disk column is organised high to low, you have a problem with disk transfer rate- it appears to be low yet shown as 100%

There are various programs running that appear unnecessary.

Suggest you do a clean boot and compare. You should expect disk usage when idle - a few mins after boot - to be zero unless there's good reason.

Comparing your 1st and 3rd screenshots, note the max transfer rate is 10x that in the 3rd screenshot.

It's not doing an update, and not apparently a paging problem.

From that it appears you have limited disk transfer rate, and the disk activity doesn't settle to near zero.

There are several threads on the topic of limited transfer rate - here are some:
Disk usage 100% please help Solved - Page 2 - Windows 10 Forums
Slow internal hard drive tansfer speeds - Windows 10 Forums
100% Disk Usage, tried some methods found online. - Windows 10 Forums

I'd suggest looking through those first, using any ideas there, keep a list of what you try, and post back with that list if you still have problems.


Please post specs of your PC. See mine for comparison.

 

How to solve 100 % disk usage in windows 10 after fall update?

Hi Manikanteswara,

Usually, a virus could be the main cause of 100% disk usage. The first step in rectifying the problem is to check your disk usages. You need to open the Task Manager and take a look at your disk usages to identify the programs or applications that are causing
your hard disk 100% usage. Here's how:

• Type task manager in the Windows search bar and select the best match.
  
• In the Processes tab, look at the disk process to see what is causing your hard disk 100% usage.

Kindly send a screenshot, so I can take a closer look.

Hoping to hear from you soon.