Windows 10 All M.2 SSDs Sequentially at 100% after boot

Monkstrosity

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Dec 13, 2020
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Hello all, new to this so bear with me. I recently purchased a 1 TB WD Black M.2 NVMe Drive and installed a fresh OS image on it, keeping my two secondary SATA WD Blue M.2 Drives full of games and just re-mapping on the new drive. Ever since then, however, the system always runs each disk, one at a time, at 100% for something like 5 minutes. It startes with the boot drive and works its way down the alphabet, causing issues like me not being able to launch certain third party and native applications. I have been unable to identify any background services demanding time from these drives, as disk usage in terms of transfers speeds is basically always at 0 when this happens. I attempted to disable auto-defrag which did not resolve the issue. If someone has a certain diag log they think I should run please let me know, I'm open to ideas. I've had the new install long enough to get everything re-added again, so I'd hate to have to start over for a second time. Thanks for the help!

Regards,
Monkstrosity
 
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Solution
Alright so through some digging I think I've located the source of the issue. It was 3rd party software after all, specifically motherboard and vga card software, that for some reason was scanning each drive on boot. I uninstalled the software in question (Smart Backup and Ready Boost from the Gigabyte App Center Suite) and the issue no longer...
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Open up Resource monitor when the issue is happening, click on Disk to expand and sort by total bytes / sec and it should tell you which process is causing the disk activity. Can be a lot of things, my first guess would be security software scanning disks.
 
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I did as instructed but it as far as I cant tell it's just the system doing it. Here's a screenshot. I confirmed the problem was effected one of the drives (drive "E: ") at the time of the screenshot.
 

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System contains all drivers which includes security software drivers. I would take a look at your end point protection and see if it has a setting to scan disks every boot.
 
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Neemobeer said:
System contains all drivers which includes security software drivers. I would take a look at your end point protection and see if it has a setting to scan disks every boot.
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So I've actually double-checked and confirmed it's not. Furthermore, I removed all 3rd party security software and the issue still occurs, so it's either not related to security or it's being caused by the OS.
 
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If it's guaranteed to happen upon boot up and login, I would boot into safe mode and see if it happens. If it doesn't then that rules out core of the OS. When the activity is in the system process then it's almost always driver related or something using a driver or drive object through the system process. Do you use any utilities for cleanup and tuning? I would remove those as well.
 
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Alright so through some digging I think I've located the source of the issue. It was 3rd party software after all, specifically motherboard and vga card software, that for some reason was scanning each drive on boot. I uninstalled the software in question (Smart Backup and Ready Boost from the Gigabyte App Center Suite) and the issue no longer occurs after boot. Thanks for taking the time to respond to me, fortunately found the answer myself due to someone else ID'ing it in a Reddit forum yesterday. Happy Holidays!
 
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Solution
You can try setting up some performance counters to try and gather more details on the disk activity. I created a Disk Utilization PM template you should be able to import and run it when you have the issue. Let it run for a minute or 2 and then stop and export the results.
 

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