i’m a intern for my high schools .I.T. Department and when we turn on our laptops with 5400rpm hdd’s the hdd is pinned at 100% at idle for about the first 10min and then turns down to a safe usage is this a good or normal thing or not???
Are the hard drives just spinning at what sounds like a high RPM or can you also here the read/write head moving as if some service (like indexing) is using the drive? If its just the sound of spinning its likely the drives are just loud and old and the best you can do is reduce the time before they sleep in power settings. If you can here them writing even when idle you need to see what is running at startup that would be causing such heavy HD utilization.
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What OS? Windows 10?
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When I had a 5400 rpm mechanical in my laptop with Windows 10, this was very much the norm. Having a look at the process tree will give you an idea as to what is doing most of the disk reads and writes. An SSD cured all of my issues.
Honestly Win10 shouldn’t be sold with these. The sheer amount of network calls kills a drive.
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I would agree. The only reason for a 5400 in a laptop is power savings. I personally would sacrafice a little longevity for more speed.
there at 100% read write
yes windows 10
Win 10 is simply not intended for spinning rust drives, especially slower ones like 5400rpm drives.
I have heard this from desktop users and laptop users. Win 10 at this stage just expects main boot drive to be am SSD and there is no toggle or other disk management method to deal with it. You just have to ride out the high usage or get an SSD.
So yes in Win 10’s with a spinning drive this is “normal”. Though it definitely should not be. It is lazyness on Microsoft’s part.
When you say 100% you mean in the “task” section of task manager, right?
What matters is that in the “performance” section of task manager you’re not seeing read and write speed around 100MB/s that could mean something really important is happening in the background.
My notebook did kinda (didn’t need 10 minutes to get the HDD usage down) teh same thing with the mechanical HDD.
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Yeah I have to agree with @Zibob Win 10 seems to have a whole host of really strange HDD problems. I have Windows Indexing, OneDrive, and any sort of automatic process turned off; update, anti-virus, cleaning, backup, etc… and the power settings set very conservatively and sometimes my storage HDD’s will just spin up of their own accord.
At boot on my Win 10 machine (with an SSD) I can’t type at full speed for probably 90 seconds after boot. Every letter takes 2-3 seconds to appear and then for no reason at all it suddenly works fine. Utilization is low, I have next to no startup programs, boot up times are otherwise quick, and my specs are more than sufficient to expect smoother performance.
Win 10 is just a strange beast…
I had Win10 installed on a WD Black that’s on the faster end of things as far as hard drives go… Not only is Windows 10 slow on hard drives in general, but on a fairly clean install with just Steam, TortoiseSVN and PuTTY, the system uptime passed 5 minutes before the HD LED even turned off. Windows 10 just isn’t efficient at all in this regard.
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Yep. The percentage on the task manager is not read/write, it’s calls. So 100% means something is going on all the time, but it doesn’t have to be heavy read or write.
lol found your problem.
But seriously, just about every HDD I’ve seen with windows 10 is questionable, IMO. SSD will probably solve this problem.
there school all-inones it’s dosen’t matter to me that much lol