Watch videos and experience full storage consumption on non-OS SSDs
Watch videos and experience full storage consumption on non-OS SSDs
Update the instructions to guide users to the comment addressing the core issue, yet still lacking a resolution. I own a local SATA SSD paired with my OneDrive (including Documents, Desktop, etc.) and also use it for downloads via qBittorrent. It’s a Fanxiang S101 2TB drive—not a T1 model at all, though most reports say it performs well. I’ve been using it for a year without any problems so far, and I ran a full block scan to confirm the advertised capacity and speeds. About two weeks ago it began acting strangely. My system started freezing often, even in games where I previously maintained smooth 200 FPS. I suspect the problem might be linked to this SSD. This drive isn’t storing my games or any apps, but it could be affecting Windows itself since Desktop is installed on it. It frequently jumps to full disk usage every few milliseconds, sometimes dropping back quickly, other times staying high for minutes. Even at 100% usage, the read/write speeds in Task Manager are around two-digit KB/s. It also appears to be slowing down my qBittorrent downloads—popular Linux ISO files with many seeders are now capped at 5–50 KiB/s, whereas I used to easily reach 50 MiB/s. I’ve completed a full chkdsk scan (F x r), took four hours, and no bad sectors were found. The drive is about 1 TB out of its 2TB capacity. Would anyone have suggestions for further troubleshooting? Could the issue be coming from somewhere else that’s causing this SSD behavior? Does this pattern look like malware?
Experienced with a comparable problem using SAS drives; unexpectedly an HDD reached full capacity then disappeared from Explorer. The root cause wasn't hardware failure but excessive heat in the RAID controller. It’s possible your NVMe device is overheating significantly. Where is it positioned? Is there sufficient ventilation? Or does the GPU contribute to airflow?
I checked the situation and everything looks normal. The drives are holding a comfortable temperature range, which is good. My NVME is on the motherboard with a built-in cooling fan, and since both the GPU and CPU are using the same case, airflow is limited. The problematic SSD in the operating system is secured to the back of the tray and likely lacks proper ventilation. With these conditions, it probably shouldn’t be an issue. The issue seems resolved temporarily.
I ran a scan with MalwareBytes followed by ADWCleaner, which found some suspicious files like a "Trojan.BitcoinStealer" and odd registry entries. I quarantined them, but it’s possible the stealer was repeatedly scanning that specific drive. A recent Windows update is downloading now and will install at the next restart. It’s unclear if this background process was affecting the drive, but Windows can behave unexpectedly.
Recently, drive activity has dropped to about 1–5%, and the task manager shows read/write speeds around 500 KB/s—consistent with normal performance. I’ll keep watching things. After a few days, everything is back to normal. I’m 99% confident it was the malware. It’s surprising considering how much protection Windows Defender offers these days.
I'm back again. It's been a few more days and things aren't improving. This time, the scan by Malwarebytes didn't show anything. ADWCleaner found a suspicious Chrome extension named sogou. I haven't seen anything about sogou in my extensions, so I used ADWCleaner to block it. So far, it hasn't reappeared. I'm holding off for a few more days hoping it doesn't come back, and if it does, that's the sign. It's strange that neither my operating system nor any of my browsers (including Chrome/Opera) are installed on this SSD it's trying to affect. The malware seems to be saying "This drive is really annoying."
I’m back again. I believe I’ve located the actual final root cause of the issue now. It stems from playing a specific video series. The file format is .mkv, encoded with x265 at 1080p and around 4500 kbps bitrate. These settings are fairly typical, so it shouldn’t be unusual. I noticed the problem immediately and it doesn’t seem to persist beyond playback. It stops completely when I close the player. It affects both MPC-BE and VLC, though VLC is more problematic. What should I do next? The scans in Windows Defender and MalwareBytes for these files didn’t show anything. Edit: It just became persistent again suddenly, even though I hadn’t watched any videos from that series all day. I’m really starting to think it might have been a coincidence.