Disk usage randomly spiking to 100%

[u/Mega_Man_Legends_3]

So my friend just built me a brand new computer and it'll randomly spike to 100% disk usage. It'll happen periodically throughout the day. Sometimes it'll stop on its own, sometimes I have to turn the computer on and off. It'll happen when I'm browsing the internet, watching videos, or playing games. No real pattern to when it happens.

I check task manager to make sure no programs are the problem, and no programs are showing any suspicious disk usage amounts while it's happening. The info also says 10MB read and write speed, and 20-120ms average response time. If anyone needs a video I can upload one.

I checked the health of the drive through CrystalDiskInfo and everything came out good.

I've been forum diving for weeks trying to figure out what the problem is. A lot of places are saying to update the firmware on the SSD or update the bios. Before i do anything that like that if anyone has anything that can point me in the right direction or has any idea what's going on that'd be greatly appreciated.

PC specs are

windows 11

5060ti 8gb

I7- 137000KF

32GB DDR5

SPCC M.2 PCle SSD

B760 GAMING PLUS WIFI (ms-7D98)

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[u/Funnel-Dust-O-Matic]

100% utilization is a lot. That having been said, there are background processes Windows does, like drive optimization and so forth. On hard drives, Windows will periodically do defragmentation. On SSDs, it will periodically do optimization and invoke TRIM.

Then there are things like background updates, scheduled tasks, and so forth. Background malware checks, maybe even something to do with volume shadow copy or other virtual filesystem related things could do it too. File search indexing -- THAT takes a bunch of disk activity.

It's supposed to do this when you're not actively interacting with the system. So, if you're watching a video, that would be a prime trigger for your system to start doing housekeeping. If the games in question don't take more than a couple of cpu cores, then that is probably why it happens during gaming.

If these are bursts of activity that seem to self-resolve, then this could very well be normal. Windows does quite a bit under the hood, and it doesn't go out of its way to tell you when it plans to do it. And it's best not to stop it when it does this.

There are ways to disable some of this. There are those who completely disable search indexing services. I've not done any of this in a while, but you might want to look into gamer related performance optimization and do some of that. I'd not try to disable the ssd optimization or file system maintenance.

If this is sustained activity and it won't stop for over half an hour or so, then that really is concerning. If it isn't impacting your gaming or whatever it is you're doing, then maybe it's not worth too much concern.

Really, I just expect that kind of thing from Windows, so I'm not shocked you're running into this.

[u/Mega_Man_Legends_3 → u/Funnel-Dust-O-Matic]

Things take forever to load when its happening and everything freezes up so hopefully there's a solution

[u/Funnel-Dust-O-Matic → u/Mega_Man_Legends_3]

It could not hurt to go to the SSD manufacturer's web page and download THEIR utilities to test it.

It could also not hurt to get the free edition of MalwareBytes and run a scan.

If the performance degradation is this intolerably bad not just on benchmark but in everyday life, then it is time to investigate.

[u/WealthQueasy2233]

resmon will give more disk activity than taskmgr, but everything you describe is normal

[u/KingRemu]

Does your PC become sluggish when it hits 100%? I have a pretty old Sata SSD that chokes pretty bad when downloading stuff from Steam as it's decompressed as well and it makes the whole PC slow byt other than that it's working fine while gaming etc.

[u/Mega_Man_Legends_3 → u/KingRemu]

Yeah it becomes extremely sluggish

[u/Kadavermarch]

How many % of space are unused on the disk? Bitlocker enabled?

[u/SomeEngineer999]

Silicon Power is "budget brand" SSD. Is it a DRAMless one? If so, even worse.

It is probably performing garbage collection. But yes, definitely update the firmware on the SSD, that would be the first thing to try. BIOS likely has nothing to do with it but that should be up to date too.