Disk usage on Aspire 7 A715-71G-51KX

Hello Folks,

im currently having trouble with my laptop. In the Task Manager the Hard Drive usage is on 100% almost all the time. The weird thing is it even occurs right after restart without any specific process using up all the performance.
I already perfomed a diskcheck ( which a few hours ), deactivated some windows services and deactivated the windows search in msconfig - but nothing seems to be helping
Furthermore i installed a tool called HDDScan and performed a VR verify, but i cant read the data.

Does anyone know more possible fixes or how can i be sure its faulty hardware needing replacement?

greetings

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aphanic

While I have never used that utility the disk seems fine to me, there are no reallocated sectors and that graph seems accurate for the drive it is.

What is actually accessing the disk when it's 100%? Open the Resource Monitor for example and look for the culprit (right click, open in a new tab to see the picture in greater detail):

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/6029997/uploads/editor/gx/b19kn8x0b926.png

TEKK0N

Hello aphanic,

thanks for your respone and you trying to help out, i appreciate it.

The tool im using basically offers 3 kinds of read and write tests, you may understand the results better than i do
verify - read data without transfer

read - read data to the host

butterfly - read data to the host with seeks

The first two tests VR-Verify and RD-Read are finished and the third one BR-Butterfly Read is currently running.

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/6029997/uploads/editor/22/y5s4nhqpungu.png

These are the first two test results

Regarding the resource monitor ill post you a screenshot but im unsure how the running butterfly test could distort the informations showing. Ill try to get clean informations as soon as the testing is finished.

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/6029997/uploads/editor/8p/d37rcy4t66wx.png

greetings

aphanic

Yep, running any kind of test skews what we can see in the resource monitor, but don't worry, you just have to open it when you're seeing a 100% disk usage out of nowhere.

At that moment I can see there was very little disk activity, it was in the hundreds of KB/s, 100% disk usage looks more like dozens of MB/s being used.

As for the read graphics they look consistent, because of it being a mechanical hard drive the speed of the different areas differ from being faster in one point and slower in another, that's why it is a curve going down as the LBA increases; perfectly normal.

TEKK0N

Hello aphanic,

The last test -which took really long - has finished too, these are the results

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/6029997/uploads/editor/8u/vuv2n1lcs6jz.png

after the testing was finished i shut the laptop down and booted it back up after some time.

The resource monitor shows the following right after boot

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/6029997/uploads/editor/7f/ukams98alhbr.png

and another one idling

Hopefully this data will help pin down the problem.
Thanks again for your help

greetings

aphanic

I just noticed the blue line is spiking at 100% in the last screenshot even when idling..

Let's try something

Download CrystalDiskMark and keep the resource monitor opened in the background so you can see the action to the hard drive. Open CDM, switch its profile to Real World Performance + Mix and set the test file to be of 2GB, that should give us enough time to see what the resource monitor picks up.

In the resource monitor, order disk activity by total bytes as usual and then switch to CDM and click the "All" button. It's an app more suited to test performance of faster media, like SSDs, but it will be taxing the disk while running, plus we'll see some data in the end.

I just recorded a video that could show similar results to yours, only I was testing an external SATA HDD mounted without write caching enabled. It was meant as a means to show how the disk usage spiked for that drive up to its maximum limit (and what that limit was), while also showing the process that was using the most I/O. The internal SSD remained idling mostly throughout the test since it was not under test, just like the rest of the disks.

When you experience a high disk usage you can always use the resource monitor to see who the culprit is (see it at 1080p or something though haha):