What the hell is going on?

[Rainbrew]

My hard drive has been acting completely insane over the past two weeks and I have no idea why. I think it might be dying on me but I have no idea. The disk ramps up to 100% usage with the values actually being quite low. Additionally there is an occasional chirp coming from the hdd and I'm completely lost as to whether this is a very odd windows 10 bug or if the drive is dying. Sometimes the most demanding program uses up 1.4 mb/s and it's still running at 100%. Thanks in advance!

[Arcanekitten]

normaly when a hard drive dies it will run at extremely slow speeds so it might be your drive dying yes

[Rainbrew]

It's not something that is constant however it randomly spikes up for no reason and goes back down sometimes after half an hour. It's not superfetch or anything of the sort

[MrChavelo]

Might be a virus.

 

Back important data up however

[BiggHertz]

Hi There,

Launch Windows Resource Monitor, click the disk tab and look to see what process and what file is being accessed. This may help narrow down what process is generating disk I/O.

-Jason

[Rainbrew]

Hi There,

Launch Windows Resource Monitor, click the disk tab and look to see what process and what file is being accessed. This may help narrow down what process is generating disk I/O.

-Jason

I've managed to identify a few things. One, the ancient motherboard my computer has is actually broken as out of the 4 sata ports it has only the second one works with the hdd, whilst all of them work with the cd drive. I think it causes a short circuit or something as the Windows 10 logo appears and then immediately goes off with a white line flashing across the middle of the screen. Additionally there is actually only one hard drive, a 1tb barracuda that is split up into 250gb with the os and a few programs while the rest is treated as a separate drive. This occurred automatically. No program in specific drains it, all programs use about 0.1mb/s just sitting there with occasionally steam or chrome or whatever I'm current doing using up 10 or so and then it's supposedly at 100%. However today when steam was trying to install something it went up to 68mb/s and was then at 100%. Could the motherboard also cause the slow speed or is this just the drive failing?

[BiggHertz]

I've managed to identify a few things. One, the ancient motherboard my computer has is actually broken as out of the 4 sata ports it has only the second one works with the hdd, whilst all of them work with the cd drive. I think it causes a short circuit or something as the Windows 10 logo appears and then immediately goes off with a white line flashing across the middle of the screen. Additionally there is actually only one hard drive, a 1tb barracuda that is split up into 250gb with the os and a few programs while the rest is treated as a separate drive. This occurred automatically. No program in specific drains it, all programs use about 0.1mb/s just sitting there with occasionally steam or chrome or whatever I'm current doing using up 10 or so and then it's supposedly at 100%. However today when steam was trying to install something it went up to 68mb/s and was then at 100%. Could the motherboard also cause the slow speed or is this just the drive failing?

 

Sounds like you have a lot of other issues with your pc...lol

 

just to provide clarification, the Active Time is not indicative of actual disk bandwidth utilized, it is the percentage of elapsed time that the selected disk drive was busy servicing read or write requests. This is typical of either super fragmented drive, or other lack of optimization. How much ram does machine have? this could be a memory paging issue where things in memory need to be persisted to disk in order to make more room for other items that are actively being worked on by the cpu, than recalled at a later time. Being as these storage volumes share the same physical disk, this will set you up for some serious disk resource contention and cause slow performance as the system is constantly waiting. This scenario will cause work items to continue to stack up. There are other metrics in resource monitor that will help,look at the average response time, and disk queue length. Report back your findings and we can see what we can do to help!

 

-Jason

[Rainbrew]

Sounds like you have a lot of other issues with your pc...lol

just to provide clarification, the Active Time is not indicative of actual disk bandwidth utilized, it is the percentage of elapsed time that the selected disk drive was busy servicing read or write requests. This is typical of either super fragmented drive, or other lack of optimization. How much ram does machine have? this could be a memory paging issue where things in memory need to be persisted to disk in order to make more room for other items that are actively being worked on by the cpu, than recalled at a later time. Being as these storage volumes share the same physical disk, this will set you up for some serious disk resource contention and cause slow performance as the system is constantly waiting. This scenario will cause work items to continue to stack up. There are other metrics in resource monitor that will help,look at the average response time, and disk queue length. Report back your findings and we can see what we can do to help!

-Jason

I'm currently running an antivirus scan to check if that might be the problem. I'm unsure what to look for in resource monitor but no fishy programs are accessing any files in an odd manner. Currently the most taxing task is the activity antivirus which is showing a 900k bit pet second read speed up to 1.5 mil but doesn't go any higher than that. The usage is at 100% although it randomly ramps down to sane values between 3-40 and then spikes up again. I defragged both "portions" or whatever they're called of the disk yesterday with one taking an hour to defrag fully. At this point I think it's the hardware failing. While typing this read has gone up to 20 million out of nowhere for the system and 6 mil for antivirus

[Rainbrew]

I just finished running the antivirus and it found nothing but the problem is gone? I'm beyond puzzled I'll keep on updating if anything happens