Computer randomly slows down and gets incredibly unresponsive randomly. Games have bad framerate drops. This has been happening since i got the machine. Open up Task Manager and the process "System" is maxing out my disk usage. It goes down again after about 45min. Any ideas?
Usually it is around ~17MB. Sometimes it jumps up and hovers around 24MB.
it could be a sign that hard drive is on it's death throes. i had an old laptop hard drive that i installed in my rig. that had this similar problem. it was doing the same thing, slowing down, also when i checked task manager it said i was using 100% at certain points in time when i wasn't. it gave my system severe hiccups like telling my my programs weren't responding. then a minute later it would go back to normal. even in games freezing for a minute or so then going back to normal. so yes it could be the death of that hard drive. also interestingly enough when i replaced that hard drive. then tried to put the old one back in my system to see if it worked. my system wasn't reading it anymore. lol if you are having similar problems to what i've described i would recommend that you back up your stuff in case it happens.
I thought that could be it too but it doesn't make much sense that it would be to me at least. The HDD isn't making any noise and read/write performance hasn't been affected. It isn't throwing off any SMART errors and I've used HD Tune and it isn't reporting any errors. Plus, the drive isn't even that old.
I've done a Google search and it seems that other people are having this issue too and it is the ntoskrnl.exe file that is using all the disk. I believe when I went into details in Task Manager it was the same thing with me.
Some said it might be Windows doing maintenance or indexing while idle?
yeah true. but for the noise i doubt you would hear the noise of a hard drive acting up. windows could be doing maintenance but not enough to slow you down to the point where it's incredibly noticeable. and programs won't really tell you if your hard drive is acting up at least from my experience then again i can be wrong. feel free to disagree with me. you'll know when its acting up when the stuff i mentioned before starts to happen more commonly. i can't personally tell you what the problem really is. but from the stuff you mentioned it could be a possibility of the hard drive death and the backup would be best if that happens to be the case, if not look at the task manager and see which is the one that makes your hard drive spark to 100% usage and end it's tasks to see if that fixes the issue.
I said what task makes it spike to 100%. It is System. Specifically ntoskrnl.exe. I noticed it isn't as random as I thought. It seems to occur every two days at around the same time. Usually 8:45 PM and lasts for around 30min. That is why I feel like it is some maintenance thing.
Turn of file indexing. I had the same problem. Or if you really want it on, select only a few things in the index and don't allow it to map your entire drive all the time.