Are you a Windows 10 user? if yes, have you ever faced this issue of your Computer disk being used 100%?
If the answer to both the questions is yes, then you might find this post useful as we are mentioning all the possible fixes for such issue.
Now 100% disk usage means your Computer is being used to its full potential, you are running some resource intensive tasks
But all if you are running is Media player trying to watch your favourite TV show you just downloaded and your Computer is still using 100% of the disk, then there is surely an issue that needs to be addressed.
Generally, we find these stats by pressing Ctrl + Delete + Enter all at once which opens the task manager, where you can see the CPU process, RAM usage and the Disk Usage.
I’ve faced this issue many times that my RAM usage was at around 40%, CPU at 2% but the Disk usage is 100%.
What could be the reason?
Your Computer runs hundreds of processes at once, so finding the culprit is pretty tough, but mostly the applications like Google Chrome, Skype, Adobe Software have earned a name in being problematic when it comes to PC performance in Windows.
If we talk about Google Chrome alone, it runs separate processes for each of the tabs, meaning the more the tabs the more work your Computer has to do.
And in some cases, if you have Chrome apps installed, they keep running in the background even when you are not using the particular Chrome app.
I’ve written some Good guides on how to keep your Computer or how to keep Google Chrome from sucking your Computer’s resources. You can give them a read if you want to know more about how to control recourse on your PC to keep it running faster.
You can also manually disable the services that are running such as Spooler, but then it will stop your Printer from functioning properly.
The 100% disk usage can also be caused because of a malware that has been injected into your PC while downloading a software from an untrusted source, apparently, more serious issues can happen if you do that, like the Ransomware attacks that were in the news lately.
Finding the Culprit and Fixing the 100% Disk usage issue
You can find the culprit from the Task Manager itself, under the processes tab, click the Disk Usage column and arrange the numbers in descending order, which will show you which processes is actually taking more than usual.
Fix 100% Disk Usage caused by Google Chrome
Like I said earlier in the post, if it’s because of Google Chrome, you can keep the number of tabs minimized and only keep the ones when are required.
Also, you can restrict Chrome apps from running in the background and only run when they are launched.
You can turn off / disable ‘ Use a Prediction service to load pages more quickly’ found under Privacy and Security section under the Advanced section of Chrome Settings.
Fix 100% Disk Usage by Upgrading to Solid State Drive (SSD)
There might be a dozen of technical things going on in your Computer that is causing your PC, some of them quite technical even for me as well, but Upgrading to an SSD would surely solve your problem.
You can get them for like $50 for 128GB and keep your OS installed on it, and use the Hard Disk to store files. The speeds of SSDs are so far that it won’t reach 100%, at least mine never did so far.
I’ve done this recently and it has been quite an amazing experience using the Windows PC. Not just the 100% disk usage was gone, the Bootup time of the PC was greatly reduced.
Here is a little helpful article if you are looking to upgrade from HD to SSD
