Hard drive runs almost continually

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LANGALIST By Fred Langa An AskWoody Plus subscriber’s new PC is bogging down from hard-drive saturation … but why? A little spelunking with Task
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woody, Elly, abbodi86

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Fred, I think you missed a really important check. The drive hardware itself. If a drive is not relatively new, this is the first check I do on my clients’ PCs. Often the cause of the problem is a drive beginning to fail. Most OEM’s offer drive tester software that tests their hardware. Hardware drive checking is different from stored data drive checking. The OEMs all have warranties and they offer drive checking software to determine if their warranty will be honoured. That software still works even if the drive is 5 years old.

CT

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Canadian Tech wrote:

If a drive is not relatively new, this is the first check I do on my clients’ PCs. Often the cause of the problem is a drive beginning to fail.

That is an excellent point, but in this instance they were referring to a new PC.

Windows 10 Pro 22H2

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Windows 10 simply doesn’t like Spinning Rust, it should only be sold with SSD machines.

I believe we are talking about the “100% Disk Utilization but nothing much is happening” problem?

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anonymous wrote:

Windows 10 simply doesn’t like Spinning Rust, it should only be sold with SSD machines. I believe we are talking about the “100% Disk Utilization but nothing much is happening” problem?

Wow, I’ve read about quite a few idiosyncrasies with Win 10 but this is the first I’ve heard that it doesn’t play well with HDD’s and really requires SSD’s to run properly.  What next?  Uh – maybe we shouldn’t answer that.

Being 20 something in the 70's was so much better than being 70 something in the insane 20's

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It’s not actually true, Windows doesn’t care what sort of disk you have.

cheers, Paul

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anonymous wrote:

Windows 10 simply doesn’t like Spinning Rust, it should only be sold with SSD machines.

I believe we are talking about the “100% Disk Utilization but nothing much is happening” problem?

I agree with that. I have a laptop with a spinner only, that I upgraded to Win 10. The disk performance is atrocious after a boot up.

By comparison, my desktop with SSD settles down relatively quickly after boot.

Windows 10 Pro 22H2

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Slow startups are usually caused by pig programs that insist on starting and continually running on every startup. Remove them or change their settings to prevent that. Autoruns from Microsoft is a good tool to track these down and end that behaviour.

If your system has been installed for more than 3 years, if you will re-install completely cleanly, you will be amazed at how much performance improves.

Windows Update frequently causes this problem.

Some antivirus programs are much worse at utilizing resources than others.

CT

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Got a 3 year old lenovo AIO that was “upgraded” from 8.1 to 10 as a business computer. Turned off & deleted as much “auto” stuff, unused ‘apps’, etc as I could by reading all the suggestions at ask woody and all the links. Though at times it does bog down during online surfing, deleting browser history & cookies does wonders. I have browser set to delete at log off. AND, even though I NEVER use MS browsers, Bing, etc, it is amazing how much relief you get by going to “internet properties” and deleting cookies there as well! Anyway, I have a rusty platter, and don’t have any real issues in my light software & internet use, or start up times. My brother never deleted from “internet properties”, I did that for him and it took 20 minutes to clear! – WHAT?!!

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Charlie wrote:

but this is the first I’ve heard that it doesn’t play well with HDD’s and really requires SSD’s to run properly.

In my observations, this seems to only apply to the Windows system drive, not to secondary HDDs and external drives.

Win10 seems to have a lot more system activity related to scheduled system processes and maintenance tasks than previous Windows versions.

On my Win10 laptop with a 5400rpm spinner, this usually means boot up and walk away for about 10 mins. or so. But on occasion during the day, I will notice a lag, and upon observing Task Manager, the C: disk drive usage has shot up and is being hogged by a svchost task.

The weirdest thing is that the CPU can be near idle and with most of the RAM free when this happens. So the system accessing the disk is usually responsible.

I did not log the tasks and processes doing this, as I have been squashing them over the past 3 years. But if you sit and watch the Task Manager when this happens, you can come to your own conclusions.

I really regret upgrading this laptop from Win 8.1. It didn’t seem to have this problem before, even with the same hardware. I have disabled as much as I dare, but cannot completely rid it of this behavior on Win 10. I’ve even considered ripping the keyboard out to access the drive bay, and upgrade to SSD. Maybe one of these days…

But on my desktop with a SSD as the system drive, the system tasks seem to only flash up and finish in seconds, so they are not a noticeable load. Quite a contrast to me.

Windows 10 Pro 22H2

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Paul T wrote:

It’s not actually true, Windows doesn’t care what sort of disk you have.

I agree, Windows doesn’t care. But you should.

In fact Microsoft recommends a new PC for the best experience with Windows 10.

“The best way to experience Windows 10 is on a new PC”

(Source): https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-7-end-of-life-support-information

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/why-does-microsoft-recommend-buying-a-new-pc-to/fa8ec1e9-9888-4c0f-84ae-2b19e1754e30

Windows 10 Pro 22H2

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