Apparent unexpected spikes in disk space usage causing system slowdown or shutdown on Windows 10.
Apparent unexpected spikes in disk space usage causing system slowdown or shutdown on Windows 10.
Hello everyone, over the past few weeks I've noticed these unexpected Disk usage spikes on my C: drive, happening randomly. I've seen it in Task Manager too—usage jumps to 100% and then all windows become unresponsive in seconds, likely because something else is hogging the disk bandwidth before the OS crashes. My only solution so far is to press the reset button. In Task Manager, I also saw that when I sort processes by disk usage from highest to lowest, none of them are using excessive bandwidth. Still, I don’t have a clear way to identify which processes are consuming disk resources. If you have more details or suggestions, please let me know. I really appreciate any help!
I've encountered the same issue on my laptop. Are you running a traditional hard drive? When I used an HDD, this happened occasionally until I switched to an SSD. I've kept it running continuously and haven't faced any problems after upgrading. The only change was moving from an HDD to a SSD. Could you share more details about your system specs and how you typically use your computer?
My setup: Ryzen 5 1600 with an ASUS ROG B450 gaming rig, paired with a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 Ti. I recently switched to a Samsung 970 Evo Plus (2TB) SSD, which hasn’t caused any issues so far—probably not the cause. I also have a Seagate Barracuda HDD (2TB) dedicated to games and an old Patriot Burst SSD (250GB) that I don’t use much. Mostly gaming and browsing the web. In my view, it shouldn’t lead to freezing from a disk bottleneck. I also recently installed some malware, but my antivirus caught it right away. Could this virus have led to sudden usage spikes?
It seems you're asking about potential causes for performance issues. The problem might be that your HDD isn't handling the workload, and Windows is shifting tasks to the C drive while transferring data back, creating double load. Also, verify available space on both your NVMe and HDD drives.
It’s rare since most times this occurs, I’m usually on YouTube or Twitch and none of my drives are under heavy use. Also, they’re not nearly full.