Random writes to C:/ causes PC to freeze

[Mirinmaru]

Hi everyone, I'm starting to lose my mind here a bit.

I have for about 1-2 years now had increasingly more problems with my setup, most of which seem to stem from Windows 10.

 

Sometimes, perhaps every 30mins or so, my pc hangs for like 2-5 seconds. I have tried cleaning and install a fresh win10 install multiple times, it helps for a while but the issue seems to come back after a while.

I have downloaded the official Windows Performance Recorder and Analyzer and successfully made a data recording during one of these freezes and from what I've seen It all comes down to one culprit.

 

The system process C:/$MFT acesses my drive, starts to write god knows what for the whole duration of the freeze and as soon as it stops my PC is responsive again. I cannot for the life of me understand why accessing the MFT would cause any of this so I ask for your help.

I have plenty of data to share, just please help me out guys. I'm going insane and will soon buy a new ssd just to stop thinking more about this.

 

All the pictures below are from different freezes, all with different tools on my secondary display to monitor my PC

 

[StDragon]

Yup, sounds like a failing drive to me. It happens.

• What kind of drive?
• How old is it?
• Have you ran vendor specific diagnostics and validated SMART health?

Other then that, the only way to know for sure is to swap it out for another drive. Process of elimination.

[Helpful Tech Witch]

3 minutes ago, StDragon said:

Yup, sounds like a failing drive to me. It happens.

• What kind of drive?
• How old is it?
• Have you ran vendor specific diagnostics and validated SMART health?

Other then that, the only way to know for sure is to swap it out for another drive. Process of elimination.

Or to try to not install any programs to the C:/ drive. Steam? D:/. EGS? D:/, ect, ect. If that doesn't fix it, then dont install a certain game. See if auto save writes are doing that.

[Mirinmaru]

37 minutes ago, StDragon said:

Yup, sounds like a failing drive to me. It happens.

• What kind of drive?
• How old is it?
• Have you ran vendor specific diagnostics and validated SMART health?

Other then that, the only way to know for sure is to swap it out for another drive. Process of elimination.

It is a 250gb HyperX Savage SSD bought In May 2017 according to my receipt. I have way older SSDs that are still chugging along fine, so thats why I tried to blame Windows. 

I never run anything but the adobe suite and windows on my system drives, all games and files are on separate disks. Redundancy you know.

When you say vendor specific do you mean any tools from Hyper X?

I have not thought of that yet, I have tried memtest, chkdsk an crystaldiskmark without any luck.

 

I were already thinking of buying a new one but was gonna keep this as a part of my system.

[StDragon]

Windows doesn't write much data at idle, but it does constantly poll it for periodic write-back activity. So if there's systemic hardware issues with the OS drive (C drive) it will freeze up just as you've described. 

[Mirinmaru]

I have checked the Kingston SSD software now (apparently kingston and hyperx is the same thing) and isn't reporting any errors at all, not even the slightest. 

What it does have tho is a firmware update which I'll try out tomorrow, not sure if it will help in any capacity but you never know.

Considering that I think maybe the mobo could be the culprit.

I had this issue a year or so ago now when I think about it where I tried to transfer large files from some secondary disks and the disk disappeared and reappeared without any warning. I ended up putting those drives in my server and they have been working fine there.

Could the mobo have gone bad? It is a 2014-15 model so it is pretty old

[StDragon]

17 hours ago, Mirinmaru said:

I had this issue a year or so ago now when I think about it where I tried to transfer large files from some secondary disks and the disk disappeared and reappeared without any warning. I ended up putting those drives in my server and they have been working fine there.

Could the mobo have gone bad? It is a 2014-15 model so it is pretty old

Possible it's the MB, but I doubt it.

 

With regards to the secondary disks that are now in the server: Was this an issue transferring between both of those drives? Or, was it between them and the SSD?

 

If the former is true, could very well be a MB issue. If it's the latter the SSD looks to be the culprit.

[homeap5]

You get proper answer already. It's drive problem. If accessing mft causes freezes, your drive has a problem.