Spike in HDD usage?

[Stlerfn]

I recently preformed some major upgrades on my computer. One thing I did was move a HDD that was in an external enclosure into the computer. Something I noticed after this is that during a game update, it was at 100% usage all the time. Once it finished it went back down but I am updating another game and want to know if this usage chart is more normal? I don’t think my other HDD does this so I am unsure if something is wrong.

[Jae Tee]

could be due to your internet connection, or perhaps the side of the platter its working on.

[Electronics Wizardy]

I think this is a smr hdd, and your doing mostly writes, so that will explain the high usage.

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 minute ago, Benji said:

@Electronics Wizardy It actually is an SMR disk which might explain that. What I am wondering about on the other hand is why it shows 100% active time without any read/write activity on the very end of the scale.

could just be a graphing bug, or a few random writes, so there was low amonts of data copies, but lots of disk usagel, could also be the hdd trying to flush the cmr buffer. 

[Stlerfn]

12 minutes ago, Benji said:

@Electronics Wizardy It actually is an SMR disk which might explain that. What I am wondering about on the other hand is why it shows 100% active time without any read/write activity on the very end of the scale.

It was bouncing back and forth on read/write

[Stlerfn]

19 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

I think this is a smr hdd, and your doing mostly writes, so that will explain the high usage.

It’s a Seagate HDD if that helps

[Stlerfn]

6 hours ago, Benji said:

Yeah. And if there are some smaller files/you are doing a larger transfer, this behaviour is completely normal on SMR disks. Also, yeah, the manufacturer does not matter. Every manufacturer now has SMR disks in their product lineup without mentioning it, which has also been mentionen in Tech News. The issue with that is exactly what you are experiencing: Larger write operations makes it significantly decline in write performance compared to regular CMR disks. Yours is an SMR disk, so that is the answer to it. As you see, you have a few periods of 100% usage with less than 10 MB/s write speeds. And there also isn't anything you can do about it because that is inherent to this type of HDD.

Ok, thank you. I just wanted to make sure it wasn’t because I moved it to an internal drive