Hard Drive Utilization is ruining my system?

[Chief Jawhawki]

I am building a PC for a friend (I've built about 14ish so far), but I'm encountering an issue I've never seen before. It has a R5 2600, 16 GB of RAM, a RX 570, and a 2 TB Seagate Hard Drive. In Task Manager, disk usage is pinned at 100% for the first 10 minutes on start up, but the data rates fluctuate between 2 MB/s and 50 MB/s. When attempting to download games from Steam, the rates go between 55 MB/s and 1 MB/s, pinned at 100% usage at the lower end, but occasionally lowering to 80% at the high end. Using common sense, I'd think that since the top end is 55 MB/s, there's no reason it should be reading 100% usage at 2 MB/s or that there should be so much "lag" during these times. Also, it seems to be bottle necking my download speeds because I usually sit at 30+ MB/s on Steam, but it's stopping and restarting in a cycle and only hitting 13 MB/s at most.  Any ideas on what I should do?

[Lord Mirdalan]

Replace the HDD with a SSD.

[trag1c]

15 minutes ago, Chief Jawhawki said:

I am building a PC for a friend (I've built about 14ish so far), but I'm encountering an issue I've never seen before. It has a R5 2600, 16 GB of RAM, a RX 570, and a 2 TB Seagate Hard Drive. In Task Manager, disk usage is pinned at 100% for the first 10 minutes on start up, but the data rates fluctuate between 2 MB/s and 50 MB/s. When attempting to download games from Steam, the rates go between 55 MB/s and 1 MB/s, pinned at 100% usage at the lower end, but occasionally lowering to 80% at the high end. Using common sense, I'd think that since the top end is 55 MB/s, there's no reason it should be reading 100% usage at 2 MB/s or that there should be so much "lag" during these times. Also, it seems to be bottle necking my download speeds because I usually sit at 30+ MB/s on Steam, but it's stopping and restarting in a cycle and only hitting 13 MB/s at most.  Any ideas on what I should do?

2MB/s could very well be maxed for this simple fact that if the drive is trying to read numerous small files that are not contiguous on the platters. This means the reads are non sequential so there is a lot of time spent waiting for the heads to come back around to that location again. It's really all dependent on what all is trying to be read from the disk. That hard drive could probably hit around 300MB/s with a fully sequential read off of contiguous data.

 

Run a disc defragment to ensure smaller seek times and less seek operations.

 

Best option is an SSD though. They don't suffer from seek times or data fragmentation so small file reads are stupid fast.

[Turtle Rig]

21 minutes ago, Lord Mirdalan said:

Replace the HDD with a SSD.

I agree, wtf you doing with a hard drive as your boot drive ?