Your hard drive is increasing speed because the SSD is handling the workload, forcing the HDD to work harder.
Your hard drive is increasing speed because the SSD is handling the workload, forcing the HDD to work harder.
I possess four drives on my PC, one of which is an SSD (C drive) containing my operating system, browser, and essential files. The other three drives—D, E, and F—serve as secondary storage for media files, photos, videos, etc. Initially, everything functions perfectly. However, after leaving the PC running for about two days, performance noticeably declines. Opening a Chrome tab I haven’t viewed in hours causes the system to slow significantly, while Spotify also becomes unresponsive. The D drive tends to reach maximum usage quickly, and loading a Chrome tab takes a long time. This issue typically occurs only with drives that have remained idle for extended periods without use. For troubleshooting, I disconnected just the D drive and waited two days; the same pattern emerged with the E drive after removing all drives except the SSD. After reconnecting all drives, the problem persisted for two days, but now it affects the E drive instead of the D drive. The PC operated flawlessly for several months before this started. If anyone has experience resolving this, your guidance would be greatly appreciated. Feel free to ask any questions.
Turn off power management on the drive to stop it from sleeping. This is the simplest fix, though not ideal. For a better approach, you should: a) leave nothing on the mechanical drives b) avoid using the drive as a temporary storage (like web browser, photoshop, scratch files) c) restrict its use only for offline data. The issue usually arises when the drive indexing tries to access the drive or save files, causing delays such as waiting 30 seconds before it can spin up again.
Likely fixed by boosting RAM or using a swapfile for indexing. Constant web traffic over two days won’t improve things. Ads will be very high during that time. Fixed by restarting regularly.