Diagnosing potential HDD issue?

adadglgmatt · November 25, 2016

I noticed this problem maybe half a year ago with my desktop computer. At some times, different windows will "hitch", or will become unresponsive even though sometimes media in those windows will continue playing. I think this tends to happen when I run Chrome. When I check "Performance" under the Windows Task Manager, it shows that my HDD (which does not have my OS, but does have most of my applications installed) is at 100% usage, but with no reading or writing. Other processes (i.e. processor, memory) are not maxing out when this happens.

At first I thought this was an issue with the HDD itself, maybe a bad sector or something, so I went and bought both a new HDD and SSD. I installed a fresh Windows 8.1 and expected the problem to go away, but the problem still persists. I'm now unsure what could be contributing to this problem. Any advice or ideas are appreciated.

Current System

Intel 540s Series 480GB SATA III SSD

WD 2TB 7200 RPM SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache HDD

GIGABYTE Radeon R9 380x

MSI 990FXA

AMD FX-6300 3.5GHz

G.Skill Sniper Series 8GB (2x4GB)

EVGA SuperNOVA 750W

Old HDD/SSD

Seagate Desktop HDD 1TB 64MB Cache SATA 6Gb/s

Kingston SSD V300 120GB SATA III