100 HDD Usage on Startup

A Silver · July 27, 2016

When i start up my pc the HDD is at 100% usage for at least 2-5 minutes. During that time i can do much as it runs quite slow. My HDD is a WD Blue 2TB. Is that normal and is there a way to fix it?

FanBlade · July 27, 2016

Open taskmanager. Go to the startup tab. This is where all the applications that start up when your computer is booted is listed. Disable the ones you don't need. Reboot your PC. Then download malwarebytes and use that to check for viruses.

Nord · July 27, 2016

Telling us its a 2TB WD Blue is around as usefull as telling somebody you have a blue car from Audi and it has XY issue.

HDD's differ in RPM, Read/Write speed and cache size, so it could be that your HDD is just old/slow and that would make the 100% usage normal most likely.

However if we assume you have a high-end HDD:

maybe you'r drive is getting "old", which could be fixed by defragmenting and/or even more hardcore formating it entirely.

CCleaner also helps to speed up a HDD sometimes very slightly, depending on how messy the user is.

Also it could be you are just having too much stuff booting up - open cmd, write in "Msconfig" for win7 or just open taskmanager and there is a tab for bootup on win8.1 - and check in both, the services aswell as the startup tab, for things that do boot once you go in windows.

Disable everything you dont need (leave the windows services though, if you dont know exactly what they do).

For example I have 4 programms in systemstart and probably around 15 services (excluding all windows ones) booting with my OS.

Also dont belive taskmanager when it comes to load % on what the HDD is doing. At least not the one in Win 8.1.

If you do want to check that, get HWmonitor. It even list read & write speed of each single drive on your system seperately.

Patrick3D · July 27, 2016

I get this occasionally following a reboot, don't know why as I've only seen it on my work laptop and performance monitor points to the wsappx service being the culprit (Windows Store background service.) Rebooting again clears it up. I can usually tell when it is going to happen due to the taskbar taking a minute or two to be drawn on the screen after log in (not talking about System Tray icons appearing, but things like the search box, Start button, time, etc...) Must be something with it not closing or starting cleanly. Since I only see it on my work laptop I assume it is either a drive firmware related bug with Windows 10 or the drive is dying. I should run a SMART utility on this drive some time to see if it detects any issues.