Terrible desktop performance. 100% Disk Usage by System

[Nana6541]

I've done every trick in the book, still nothing. One curious oddity is that when I don't have an Nvidia driver installed the system runs faster. Gaming performance is abysmal and doesn't run as well as it used to. It just happened one day where the whole computer was "snail's pace" to put it lightly. It was fine the day before but even light 2D games struggle to run properly. Any other fixes are very much needed. 

 

My Specs (HP Pavilion Gaming-15 Laptop):
GTX 1650 4GB
Intel Core i5 9300H
8x2 GB RAM 2333 MHz
1 TB 7200 RPM HDD
Windows 10 64-bit

[Vishera]

11 minutes ago, Nana6541 said:

I've done every trick in the book, still nothing. One curious oddity is that when I don't have an Nvidia driver installed the system runs faster. Gaming performance is abysmal and doesn't run as well as it used to. It just happened one day where the whole computer was "snail's pace" to put it lightly. It was fine the day before but even light 2D games struggle to run properly. Any other fixes are very much needed. 

 

My Specs (HP Pavilion Gaming-15 Laptop):
GTX 1650 4GB
Intel Core i5 9300H
8x2 GB RAM 2333 MHz
1 TB 7200 RPM HDD
Windows 10 64-bit

What do you mean by "100% Disk Usage"?

Do you mean 100% average active time?,or that the disk is full and has no free space?

If it's at 100% average active time then the solution is to replace the drive with a SSD,

Since hard drives freeze and lag the whole system when they are at 100% average active time.

 

While i use a hard drive as a boot drive for my main rig - It never even gets to 100% average active time so i have no such problems.

[Tech87]

Do you have a slot to upgrade to an SSD drive?

 

They're very affordable these days, and their peformance vs typical 7200rpm drives are substantially better.

[xAcid9]

9th Gen gaming laptop w/o SSD? What?

 

Have you try Reboot? Not Shutdown. 

[Vishera]

6 minutes ago, Tech87 said:

They're very affordable these days, and their peformance vs typical 7200rpm drives are substantially better.

My TOSHIBA P300 3TB 7200RPM hard drive beats my Kingston A400 120GB SATA SSD,

So there are cases where cheap SSDs are slower than hard drives.

 

And of course none of those drives can beat my SAMSUNG 860 EVO 512GB SATA SSD,which is way faster than both.

[Nana6541]

8 minutes ago, xAcid9 said:

9th Gen gaming laptop w/o SSD? What?

 

Have you try Reboot? Not Shutdown. 

It's super budget and I bought it 2 years ago, please don't judge.

[Nana6541]

11 minutes ago, Tech87 said:

Do you have a slot to upgrade to an SSD drive?

 

They're very affordable these days, and their peformance vs typical 7200rpm drives are substantially better.

I'm gonna buy a new laptop in less than 2 years time anyway. Plus I live in poverty.

[Levent]

2 minutes ago, Nana6541 said:

1 TB 7200 RPM HDD

There is your answer. It is most likely your HDD dying or just being a mechanical drive.

 

3 minutes ago, Vishera said:

My TOSHIBA P300 3TB 7200RPM hard drive beats my Kingston A400 120GB SATA SSD,

Yeah lets not act like overall disk bandwidth makes the most difference here. IOPS is what matters when it comes to response, no HDD is able to come close to SSDs in that matter.

[Nana6541]

13 minutes ago, Vishera said:

What do you mean by "100% Disk Usage"?

Do you mean 100% average active time?,or that the disk is full and has no free space?

If it's at 100% average active time then the solution is to replace the drive with a SSD,

Since hard drives freeze and lag the whole system when they are at 100% average active time.

 

While i use a hard drive as a boot drive for my main rig - It never even gets to 100% average active time so i have no such problems.

The whole system refuses to run like it did a day ago. It just suddenly became really slow. Checking task manager, the "System" seems to be utilising 100% of the disk. I hope you understand what I mean haha

[Nana6541]

1 minute ago, Levent said:

There is your answer. It is most likely your HDD dying or just being a mechanical drive.

 

Yeah lets not act like overall disk bandwidth makes the most difference here. IOPS is what matters when it comes to response, no HDD is able to come close to SSDs in that matter

Perhaps it is dying, I've only been using it for a little over 2 years and I would expect it to at least last 2 more years. 

[Levent]

Just now, Nana6541 said:

Perhaps it is dying, I've only been using it for a little over 2 years and I would expect it to at least last 2 more years. 

HDDs are purely luck. I had ones die within months and I had ones that I have been using for 13 years non stop. What you can do in this case is:

A) Check the disk for issues. 

B) Keep the device turned on, so it can do whatever it is currently doing.

C) Do the both.

[Vishera]

1 hour ago, Levent said:

Yeah lets not act like overall disk bandwidth makes the most difference here. IOPS is what matters when it comes to response, no HDD is able to come close to SSDs in that matter.

I am talking about speed,

My TOSHIBA P300 is usually at 120MB/s

While my Kingston A400 starts at 220MB/s and then suddenly dips to ~100MB/s and stays there...

[Vishera]

9 minutes ago, Levent said:

HDDs are purely luck. I had ones die within months and I had ones that I have been using for 13 years non stop. What you can do in this case is:

 

Well,all of my hard drives survived at least 8 years,

It's more about the quality of the drive than luck.

If you buy the cheapest hard drive on the market you are more likely to end up with a low quality one.

[Nana6541]

21 minutes ago, Levent said:

HDDs are purely luck. I had ones die within months and I had ones that I have been using for 13 years non stop. What you can do in this case is:

A) Check the disk for issues. 

B) Keep the device turned on, so it can do whatever it is currently doing.

C) Do the both.

I've run the chkdsk command. During which my computer does seem to be running faster, perhaps it is true that I've been hampering it's progress. I will continue to monitor it. Thank you :)

[Kilrah]

31 minutes ago, Vishera said:

While my Kingston A400 starts at 220MB/s and then suddenly dips to ~100MB/s and stays there...

And the point is that mostly as an OS drive the sequential speeds mean nothing, you lose a lot more time in random accesses to which HDDs are terrible at.

[xAcid9]

57 minutes ago, Nana6541 said:

It's super budget and I bought it 2 years ago, please don't judge.

Sorry but even a cheap SSD will perform much better as boot drive for Windows 10 compare to HDD.

 

1. You can try disabling WIndows Update and BITS (Background Intelligent Transfer) services. 

2. Download Adwcleaner and scan for Adwares. https://toolslib.net/downloads/viewdownload/1-adwcleaner/

3. Download CrystalDiskInfo or HDDTune to check your HDD Health. https://crystalmark.info/en/software/crystaldiskinfo/

4. Open start menu and search Defrag. Run Defrag and check how bad is your drive fragmentation. 

 

 

45 minutes ago, Vishera said:

While my Kingston A400 starts at 220MB/s and then suddenly dips to ~100MB/s and stays there...

Yes because that drive don't have DRAM as cache hence the dip in seq speed after a period of time but the Random 4K speed is >10x better than a normal HDD if not all HDD. 

[Nana6541]

2 minutes ago, xAcid9 said:

Sorry but even a cheap SSD will perform much better as boot drive for Windows 10 compare to HDD.

 

1. You can try disabling WIndows Update and BITS (Background Intelligent Transfer) services. 

2. Download Adwcleaner and scan for Adwares. https://toolslib.net/downloads/viewdownload/1-adwcleaner/

3. Download CrystalDiskInfo or HDDTune to check your HDD Health. https://crystalmark.info/en/software/crystaldiskinfo/

4. Open start menu and search Defrag. Run Defrag and check how bad is your drive fragmentation. 

Well, it would be nice if every solution to a PC's problem isn't "Spend more money". I've defragmented as a first attempt but it didn't make anything faster. I disabled Windows updates long ago too, and it didn't help. I've run chkdsk and it didn't find any errors. I have disabled every unnecessary service that are recommended by guides everywhere. I've gone so far as to debloat the system with scripts. None of which fixed the issue. Every time I move my mouse to click on something, e.g. open New Edge, the CPU and Disk utilisation will shoot up to 100% and the computer starts beeping and the mouse lags a lot until it eventually subsides. 

 

Do you know what this could be? I've noticed that uninstalling the GPU driver helped, but no matter which driver I use it will run poorly.

[Vishera]

15 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

And the point is that mostly as an OS drive the sequential speeds mean nothing, you lose a lot more time in random accesses to which HDDs are terrible at.

6 minutes ago, xAcid9 said:

Yes because that drive don't have DRAM as cache hence the dip in seq speed after a period of time but the Random 4K speed is >10x better than a normal HDD if not all HDD. 

 

That's true,any SSD will be better as an OS drive.

 

[Kilrah]

2 minutes ago, Nana6541 said:

Every time I move my mouse to click on something, e.g. open New Edge, the CPU and Disk utilisation will shoot up to 100% and the computer starts beeping and the mouse lags a lot until it eventually subsides. 

Your drive might be failing / having bad sectors, see what crystaldiskinfo says about it:

https://crystalmark.info/en/software/crystaldiskinfo/

[xAcid9]

9 minutes ago, Nana6541 said:

Every time I move my mouse to click on something, e.g. open New Edge, the CPU and Disk utilisation will shoot up to 100% and the computer starts beeping and the mouse lags a lot until it eventually subsides. 

That sound like driver Timeout Detection and Recover (TDR) happened which usually related to graphic driver/hardware.

 

Can you open Event Viewer and check your windows log for any TDR errors?

[Nana6541]

Like this? There seems to be quite a few errors but I don't know which to look at in particular...

[xAcid9]

Click System and find something like this.

 

[Nana6541]

2 minutes ago, xAcid9 said:

Click System and find something like this.

 

Oh yeah, there's a lot of errors and even some criticals. I've sorted from worst to best. 

[Nana6541]

21 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

Your drive might be failing / having bad sectors, see what crystaldiskinfo says about it:

https://crystalmark.info/en/software/crystaldiskinfo/

Here it is

[xAcid9]

5 minutes ago, Nana6541 said:

Oh yeah, there's a lot of errors and even some criticals. I've sorted from worst to best. 

-snip-

Can you use the "Filter Current Log" on the right side and only tick Warning?