# Hard drive usage always at 100%



## Taibo (Mar 5, 2009)

My laptop (Lenovo Y510p) is always at 100% disk usage for the first 15-20 minutes of starting up, and for intermittent periods afterwards. During this period, everything essentially freezes including the Start Menu, Task Manager, and all other apps running. After about 5 minutes, the hard drive "catches up" and everything starts working again.

The strange part is that when looking at Task Manager / Resource Monitor, the total read/write of the hard drive does not appear to be very high - ie it will be at 100% disk usage but the highest program is reading/writing maybe 0.1MB/s.

This is causing the laptop to become borderline unusable. I have to leave the laptop running in order for it to be usable, as shutting it down / putting it to sleep will cause the hard drive to go back to 100%, and everything comes to a standstill. Please help!

I've attached some pictures which should illustrate what's going on hopefully.

Specs: Lenovo Y510p, 2 years old, running Windows 10 Home 64-bit (upgraded from Windows 8.1).


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## thedarkness (Dec 30, 2004)

I don't see a problem in your images, although perhaps someone else can be of more help. Click here if you have Chrome and Skype installed. That seems to be quite common. I'd also be checking the drive for errors, then limiting the number of start up programs I have manually installed, to try and find the culprit (making sure no linked services are also running). 

Perhaps it's something simple such as an incompatible antivirus. Some site suggest Clearing cache, changing virtual memory or switching off unnecessary search/indexing settings as a last resort, but I suspect this may only help speed up a system slightly rather than solve your issue. 

Make sure you have the latest drivers for your system and drive from it's official website, and latest version of Lenovo expresscache (some users on the Lenovo site mention this program with high hdd usage).


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## Taibo (Mar 5, 2009)

Hmm thanks, I've done the Chrome and Skype steps, as well as chkdsk, and still no improvement. 

Just to be clear, the system performs fine most of the time, but when the hard drive goes up to 100% then everything becomes nonfunctional - Start Menu freezes, Ctrl-Alt-Del doesn't work, etc. I can still move the mouse and sometimes even click on windows, but interaction is minimal. The pictures are basically screenshots I was able to quickly grab before the entire system froze for 15-20 minutes.

As you can see in the Resource Manager screenshot, the actual disk read/wrte (the green line) is actually not that high. But the disk active time (the blue line) is at 100%.


EDIT: Something I forgot to mention, when I boot up the laptop, Windows 10 will fail to load the firs time - it will actually give me an 'Inaccessible Boot Device' error, which automatically restarts the computer. After this restart, Windows 10 boots normally (although I still need to wait for the 100% hard disk activity to 'calm down' before I can use anything)


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## storm5510 (Mar 26, 2009)

Your first image shows "Disk 0" at 100%, yet it has no assigned drive letter. "Disk 1" contains volumes C and D. The seems, to me, like an odd configuration. If I were dealing with this, I would (a) initialize Disk 0 giving it a logical assignment, or (b) disconnect Disk 0 and restart the machine.

I looked a the similar graph on my system, which is below. Disk 0 is the boot-drive with one volume, C:. Note Disk 1. It is an old Seagate with many hours that I use for oddball things. When I first put Disk 1 in, Windows 10 seemed a bit confused about actually seeing it because it was not initialized/formatted, and became a bit sluggish. I had to boot back to the BIOS settings and save them, again, to get Windows to recognize the old drive. Once I set the drive up properly, the sluggish behavior stopped. I did the setup of Disk 1 with *Administrative Tools* > *Computer Management* > *Disk Management*. You may want to take a look at this and see what it says about Disk 0.


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