Powerful PC sluggish with near constant 100% disk usage for just about anything

Hello,

I have been having this problem for a few months now, but never got around to fixing it until now where it has gotten so bad my pc is unreliable for work.

CPU Intel Core i7-6700K

Motherboard Asus Z170-A ATX LGA1151

Memory Kingston FURY 8GB DDR4

Power Supply Corsair 650W 80+ Gold

Video Card Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1080 G1 gaming

OS windows 10

Storage Seagate Barracuda 2TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive

Ever since this pc was built it would have random 100% disk usage for a while after boot until it would stop, I never found a solution for it but I could just wait it out fine. A few months ago, I built a pc for someone else and traded some of my parts with his, giving him my 16GB ram and gtx 1070 for his 8 GB ram and his GTX 1080, for he didn't need the graphical power in the end. I am unsure if that has to do with anything but just saying it just in case.

I am unsure if it coincided with when the switch was made, but a few months ago my pc began having slowdowns with firefox, with 100% disk usage. It soon started having slowdowns on everything, for launching any kind of applications. It was especially noticeable with applications such as word and steam. I found out later it was doing this for everything including games, which would suffer until everything was loaded in the ram and no one could tell from playing.

Any application that uses the disk quickly skyrockets the disk usage, no matter what. The only reason the disk is not constantly at 100% is that some applications manage to finish what they want before achieving 100%, which can happen within 5 seconds.

This happens regardless of read/write speed, and at one point during a extremely bad slowdown I saw the average response time got over 200 ms.

It has gotten so bad some applications are simply unusable. I tried out destiny 2 and it would run flawlessly but every 3 minutes fps would tank right before a corner or a door, clearly when the game loads another section of the map.

I have tried scanning the disk, defragmenting it, scanning it with data lifeguard diagnostic from WB, and everything returned saying the disk was in perfect shape. I recently enabled quota management as per recommended by someone I knew, and it seems to help a tiny bit, with some applications going up to 90% instead of the usual 100% when nothing else is running, but this doesn't seem to solve the issue.

I know there are several big disk usage programs I could try to disable, wsappx, windows telemetry, avira antivirus, windows search index and a lot more, but these wont fix the issue, the pc should be able to run them too and sometimes it's the "system" process that consumes everything which i can't turn off for obvious reasons.

I know having no SSD is a bottleneck but I thought an HDD could still give a decent performance and I would like to make sure the issue is fixed before upgrading, unless that is the only solution. What should I expect from only having an HDD without problems in terms of performance?

One last thing, the disk is a bit full, with 156GB free of 1.81 right now.

I appreciate any input you might have, thanks for your time.

Submitted November 18, 2017 at 05:50PM by echotim http://ift.tt/2zfi2IZ