Will getting a new HDD help lower my disk usage?

[ImperialXRO]

My Pc is hitting 100% disk usage far to often causing me to have problems in games with lag. would getting a new hard drive and transferring half my files over to it help. Also if i was to do this what is the best way to do so?

 Thanks 

 Ben

[Subduck]

My Pc is hitting 100% disk usage far to often causing me to have problems in games with lag. would getting a new hard drive and transferring half my files over to it help. Also if i was to do this what is the best way to do so?

 Thanks 

 Ben

My mate had this problem. He just bought a 500GB SSD and put everything on that instead

[stupidhuman]

Wouldn't really reduce usage, but it might not slow down as much.

 

Edit:  New HDD? Never mind.

[ImperialXRO]

My mate had this problem. He just bought a 500GB SSD and put everything on that instead

did this solve the problem?

 

[ImperialXRO]

Wouldn't really reduce usage, but it might not slow down as much.

so what would be causing my high disk usage

[ClownFace1511]

You would be best getting an SSD for your main drive and using your HDD as storage and for games. The reason why it is high is due to the fact you probably have a lot of background tasks running and also HDD's are slow and cant keep up with the traffic so it runs at 100% trying to maintain the load. If you get an ssd it will majorly speed up your system and ur HDD can be used for mass storage. Although they are a bit expensive it is definitely worth the investment. 

[ScottyC]

I had this problem (blame avast!) short answer is no, I put a 1tb HDD and a 120gb SSD in my the usage on the SSD (where the OS is) STILL 100% at startup but for less time compared to the stock 750gb HDD that I had

 

 

so yes it IS worth it to move to a SSD but it most likely WONT prevent your usage to go 100%

 

its just something you're gonna have to get use to during the first 5-10 minutes after startup

[Subduck]

did this solve the problem?

 

yup

[ImperialXRO]

You would be best getting an SSD for your main drive and using your HDD as storage and for games. The reason why it is high is due to the fact you probably have a lot of background tasks running and also HDD's are slow and cant keep up with the traffic so it runs at 100% trying to maintain the load. If you get an ssd it will majorly speed up your system and ur HDD can be used for mass storage. Although they are a bit expensive it is definitely worth the investment. 

what would i need to put on my sdd to help speed it up? the os?

[ImperialXRO]

I had this problem (blame avast!) short answer is no, I put a 1tb HDD and a 120gb SSD in my the usage on the SSD (where the OS is) STILL 100% at startup but for less time compared to the stock 750gb HDD that I had

 

 

so yes it IS worth it to move to a SSD but it most likely WONT prevent your usage to go 100%

 

its just something you're gonna have to get use to during the first 5-10 minutes after startup

k thanks man

[ClownFace1511]

what would i need to put on my sdd to help speed it up? the os?

Yeah, reinstall windows and all ur programs on the ssd and if you have games put it on ur hdd. Id suggest get a 250gb ssd but if you dont got the cash 120gb will be fine.

[ImperialXRO]

Yeah, reinstall windows and all ur programs on the ssd and if you have games put it on ur hdd. Id suggest get a 250gb ssd but if you dont got the cash 120gb will be fine.

ok so would this involve having to get a new version of windows. if not how would i get it on to my SSD

[ImperialXRO]

Yeah, reinstall windows and all ur programs on the ssd and if you have games put it on ur hdd. Id suggest get a 250gb ssd but if you dont got the cash 120gb will be fine.

also what 250gb ssd would you reconmend

[soup]

Is your system perhaps low on RAM ?  It may be doing a lot of swapping to the HDD hence pushing up its usage . 

This is just another line to think about.

[GetGeekified]

There are a lot of variables when it comes to system resources, several of which are mentioned below. I'm assuming you're using a hard drive since you said "disk". If your system is making heavy usage of disk cache (Page File for Windows), system memory may be the problem.

• Is this a consistent load or only specific instance? (when booting, or running a specific game, etc)
• How much memory (RAM) does your system have?
• What all are you running in the background?
• Is there at least 15% of your hard drives capacity free?
• Is your hard drive heavily fragmented?

Simply adding a new drive (HDD or SSD) may not solve the issue either. Many people will say get an SSD all day long, but if your system is low on memory that SSD isn't going to do much. Pending that your system does have adequate memory, then an SSD may help. Typically companies (the manufacturers, stores, etc) all like to market the performance of a drive based on the sustained read and write speeds. The fact of the matter is that throughput only matters when transferring data, what will truly have an impact (and is the reason an SSD will make a system feel very snappy) are IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second). SSD exceed the performance of HDD in both throughput and IOPS, which will provide a better overall experience.

 

If you do get a second drive, which I assume would be an SSD, you may either clone your current drive to the SSD or do a fresh install. I highly recommend doing a fresh install. If you have a legitimate copy of Windows you will not need to purchase another license or a new version. You will only be allowed to install and use your copy of Windows on one PC however. If you are going to use Steam, put the game data on the HDD. If your HDD is in good condition, I would say to leave your documents there as well. Documents do not require much bandwidth to load; that being said they will still load faster from an SSD.

 

As far as getting an SSD, you would be good to go with a Crucial or Samsung. If you are in the U.S. or somewhere you may take advantage of Black Friday and Cyber Monday I would wait. More than likely a Samsung 850 Evo 500GB will be around $130-$145 (as they may easily be picked up for $165 currently).

[ClownFace1511]

Samsung Ssd's are top notch and will probably last forever, well two of my 840's seem to be. Adata have some decent ones which are also cheap. HyperX has good ones aswell but a tad expensive. All ssds these days are fairly decent and will do the same job, some are faster than others but not by much. I have had problems with ocz drives so just be careful but I'm not saying don't get it.

[Abreed05]

For an SSD I would recommend something like the 250GB Crucial BX100 it runs for about $80 USD.

That is what I put in my system recently as it had great reviews everywhere for life expectancy.

 

If your computer is consistently at 100% disk usage it could be a few things.

 

Paging file as mentioned above. (Usually this problem is not enough RAM in the system)

 

Click Start > Search DXIDAG and run that tool.

The very first page that comes up offers a lot of information to appropriately troubleshoot the issue.

Memory and Page file are what you want to look at.

 

Also how many games are on your system? I assume you are running Windows 7 - 10?

 

As for copying you OS to a SSD there a number of ways to go about that.

 

This article from How to Geek - should help http://www.howtogeek.com/97242/how-to-migrate-windows-7-to-a-solid-state-drive/

 

Also is your computer a laptop or a desktop? That will also help to determine facts that can help us.

 

But to answer your original question rather it will help or not is still kind of up in the air.

 

If it is a memory problem it is doubtful that it will help to much. As your paging file will just keep eating the space.

 

A larger drive like a 1TB would help a lot. But so would your original drive and an SSD as you can you can use the Paging file and the OS on your SSD

and keep all of your games, movies, pictures etc. on the original drive.

[Xenift]

I had this problem, it is caused by malware, clean your pc up and it should be fine(facreset)

[GetGeekified]

I had this problem, it is caused by malware, clean your pc up and it should be fine(facreset)

 

Malware is not the only cause. Windows Update can do this too if it bugs out. Run a load of background task without adequate memory and watch what your system does.

[Xenift]

Malware is not the only cause. Windows Update can do this too if it bugs out. Run a load of background task without adequate memory and watch what your system does.

All those factors can be ruled out fairly easily, and also you mentioned them before, that is why i didn't repeat.

[tmlhalo]

In the meantime if you have a usb drive you aren't using you can enable caching to help out the hard disk. (Caching is copying files to a faster memory dynamically.) Just plug in an empty USB drive, right click on it, properties, readyboost tab at the top, dedicate this device to readyboost. If the amount of readyboost memory is 4096MB but the drive is >4096MB it is because FAT32 has a 4GB file size limitation. Right click on start, disk management, MAKE SURE to select the USB drive in the bars listed and right click, format. Then select NTFS for the new file system. Once done redo steps on readyboost. IF I remember Windows will only cache its own files but either way it will help the hard drive not have perform as many reads / traveling.