In a nutshell, the problem looks like this picture:
In short, gigantic latency, very slow read speed (I assume that is caused by the same thing). After a very very painful few minutes, everything seems to go back to normal.
What the heck is going on that can cause that?
Note: Note the fact that 100% activity happens at a wide range of speeds.
I had the same issue. I resolved it by changing the power plan from 'Balanced' to 'High performance'. Instant results.
Running the following command appears to have fixed the problem:
chkdsk /b /f /v /scan c:
In the chkdsk version included with Windows 10 these flags mean:
/b NTFS only: Re-evaluates bad clusters on the volume (implies /R)
/f Fixes errors on the disk.
/v On FAT/FAT32: Displays the full path and name of every file on the disk.
/scan NTFS only: Runs an online scan on the volume
/r Locates bad sectors and recovers readable information (implies /F, when /scan not specified).
Thanks to @hennes for the inspiration.
Another reason for extremely HDD usage is MS Windows Defender. There is some antimalware service under Windows 8 that belongs to Windows Defender.
I would check out your hard drive's performance.
Acronis Drive Monitor will work and is free. I use this, it's really good. However, like all of these things, it's only as good as the signal route - IE, a bad cable may cause false positives etc so if you can also test the cable you will have the extra reassurance (and of course then the port on the motherboard! Although normally, the results are pretty accurate I just wanted to point out it could be something else.)
Acronis Drive Monitor: Estimate health percentage, and use Windows Event Log events (which may be related to risk of data loss). Can trigger automatic backup on S.M.A.R.T. alert when combined with Acronis backup software.
Wikipedia also gives you an overview of such S.M.A.R.T tools (too much to copy across).
One of the contributors to this site, Ramhound suggests SpinRite (from another post). Despite it saying XP at places, it should work for W8 fine.
The results of reports based on S.M.A.R.T data should be taken into context. Many of the problems HDDs have they are not even aware of. The best way to have a healthy drive is to run it through a program that will read each and every sector often. This allows the HDD to move data from bad sectors to good sectors and then mark any sectors it determines as bad as unusable. This is far more useful then say a defrag although it should be said, running a defrag, often does exactl this. One program I use for for all my HDDs is SpinRite. – Ramhound
Use xperf from the WPT (part of the Windows 8 SDK) to trace the disk IO:
To others: I had this exact same problem. Nearly identical screenshot to this one. Max usage, low throughput, latency through the roof. I tried disabling services--like indexing--, chkdsk, power management options, and even crazy things like disabling IPv6 per an Amazon review of my drive (desperate, I know). Nothing I did worked. So I did some research on my drive and unfortunately found that many many other users were experiencing the same issue.
Ultimately, I emailed the manufacturer of my drive and laid out my case, stating that this drive model was defective and requesting that I can send it in and receive the next model up in return (which has 1000+ good reviews). A friendly phone call later and for a very small fee, they complied (negotiate down their fee!). Yesterday I got the new drive and it's night and day. Incomparable. The old SSD was slower than spinning by a large margin, and the new one feels like every other proper SSD I've used. It's wonderful.
If you found this page because of similar issues, spinning or SSD, I'd highly suggest you do some Googling and potentially follow-up with the manufacturer to exchange it. I am very glad I did. Good luck.
My download-HDD had almost the same symptoms.
It ended up being the SATA port which had broken, making the HDD go to 100% activity, but not reading or writing anything, whenever the HDD wrote to itself.
I solved it, by simply moving the SATA cable for the affected harddrive to another port.
Check if you have drive indexing turned on. In the past I've heard HDDs rip like chainsaws as they look over every file on the drive. Try disabling it temporarily from services and see if that changes anything.
