Does full disk usage lead to the system freezing?
Does full disk usage lead to the system freezing?
I understand, this was all I managed to accomplish at the moment. I can observe the operations, but the main process is running 180,000 bytes which is not ideal for an SSD. When I powered on the PC, the disk remained active at 100% for 30 minutes, making it impossible to do anything.
I waited 5 to 10 minutes before I could access the task manager and resource monitor.
Eventually, I opted for a system reset and everything seems to be functioning correctly now. I also saved a restore point right after the reset in case any problems return.
I will keep updating here if I discover the cause of the issue or if it recurs.
Windows updates may restart again, leading to increased disk activity.
I might attempt to apply the updates once more and check for any impact on the drive's write speed. Please share additional details when they become available.
An update some days later. I completely reinstalled Windows 10 and formatted the Samsung 980 NVME, functioning smoothly for two to three days. This morning, launching took roughly five minutes, then the PC became nearly unresponsive for about thirty minutes while disk usage decreased.
I’m now completely confused. A benchmark for this drive still shows a sequential write speed of 215MB/s. I attempted to reinstall the NVME Express Controllers and confirmed the disk is 4k aligned. I removed all Windows updates, even though I installed them immediately after the reinstall. I ran additional SMART tests and everything checked out without issues.
In short, I don’t know what changed on the system regarding drivers or other settings. Everything seemed to be installed right after the Windows update and it worked fine for a few days afterward.
There’s a BIOS update available, and I intend to apply it, although the update notes don’t reference anything related.
What might be causing this? If the SSD was faulty, why would it still function properly after reinstalling Windows?
Updated the BIOS to the latest version. Still experiencing a 215MB/s write speed that seems to be hindering further improvement. Tested PCIe M.2.2 and M.2.1 configurations at both PCIe5 and PCIe4 speeds, but no changes were made. Conducted additional tests without encountering any problems. Ran malware scans with Malwarebytes and confirmed all drives are clean. Noted that despite early performance issues, the system operates normally and reboots quickly. The problem appears to occur specifically when shutting down and restarting the PC overnight. Possible cause could be related to varying power states.
During testing, I generated a 6GB archive and began transferring it across various drives. When moving it to/from the affected drive, the initial speed was 2-3GB/s, then plummeted to 100-200/s. By this stage, half of the archive was already copied, and I had to wait for the rest. This happened no matter if I was copying to or from the system partition. Using the new NVME, everything ran smoothly at nearly 5GB/s without any interruptions. It wasn’t just the numbers that caught my attention—it was the system’s unresponsiveness, which lasted about 30 minutes at a time, prompting my investigation. I believe that having apps like Steam, Discord, and Spotify launch on startup wouldn’t normally cause such a prolonged freeze under normal conditions. Even with Windows updates and other processes running, this behavior is unusual.
@Biocc
, I'm sorry to read about your problems, that sucks bigtime.
Unfortunately I have the exact same problem, being it that in my case I did not make any changes on the HW side lately that could contribute to the problem. So in that sense, it might very well be that your HW shuffling did not cause this problem at all!
I am running two M2 drives, a Samsung 980Pro as boot disk and a Kingston SNV2S2000G as data disk. About 3-4 days ago I suddenly experienced problems with booting up and often needed 2 or 3 power cycles before I could boot windows (10). Further investigating showed that my data disk was constantly at 100% usage, but still only able to push a few kilobytes of data through...
It all sounds very similar to your problem and unfortunately I have not figured out the problem yet. Since I barely use the PC other than running a single (already installed) game, there is very little that is changing on my PC that could cause this problem. Right now the only thing I have left to suspect is Windows update...
I hope this information may help you narrow down your own problems and in case you happen to have figured out the rootcause I'm more than happy to hear about it! Meanwhile I'll continue to debug this issue as well
I believe I discovered the answer to my issues! In my situation, the problem appears to stem from a faulty Windows update package... The exact reason behind this significant performance drop remains unclear, but the fix I found is listed here:
Dism and SFC
An open-source wiki for r/TechSupport
rtech.support
In short, I performed some Windows diagnostics by executing DISM followed by SFC, which resolved the issue (at least temporarily).
Hey! Thanks for letting me know. My problem was fixed after a while, though I'm still unsure what caused it or exactly what resolved it.
I ran several windows reinstalls, and the disk worked fine for a day or two after each one. Eventually, I completely wiped the SSD through the BIOS. I think it was the sanitization option, but this might depend on the manufacturer of the SSD.
It looks like the mix of wiping and reinstalling helped, but I'm not sure what specifically worked.
Still, I'm glad your issue was also resolved!