High hard drive usage

[MaxS]

I've been having this problem with my hard drive for about the past 6 weeks where just doing simple multitasking (multiple broswer tabs with spotify and Skype open) will really stress it to maximum load although when I look at resource monitor it says the maximum load of the HDD is only 10mb/s? a more recent example is that I was playing a game last night while talking to my friend on skype with google chrome open and the HDD was constantly at maximum load which would cause the game and google chrome to repeatedly crash.Is there a way to fix this or did I just buy a bad HDD. I've tried switching which SATA port it was plugged into and also a new cable and neither have helped

 

OS - Windows 7 Professional 64 bit

Motherboard - Gigabyte B85M-D3H

Bios version F9

CPU - Intel i5 4670

GPU - Gigabyte GTX 750ti

RAM - 4GB

HDD - Western Digital blue 3.5 inch 7200RPM

PSU - EVGA 500w

[William12h]

Check your Antivirus software for its real time protection, if its on then it will scan the hard drive constantly but also when the cpu is under a certain load it will do proper scans of your system

[lvh1]

What's your RAM usage when this happens? If it's around 90%, your HDD is constantly swapping things from the ram to it in order to make up for the lack of free RAM.

As example, I have chrome open with 6 tabs and a couple of background programs and I'm using 4.0 GB of RAM already.

[MaxS]

My antivirus is AVG free so where would I look for real time protection in that? And when I was experiencing the crashes last night the RAM usage was around 70%

[lvh1]

My antivirus is AVG free so where would I look for real time protection in that? And when I was experiencing the crashes last night the RAM usage was around 70%

Something like this should work

 

 

But I'm not sure this is actually the problem.

 

When you're experiencing this problems, can you open resource monitor and check out which process is using the most reads/writes? 

Like this: http://i.imgur.com/WMzKSPi.png