My laptop has a secondary internal 1 TB hard drive with more than 200 GB of free space. It worked normally last week, but now Windows Task Manager constantly shows 100% disk usage and games or other files on the drive barely load. CrystalDiskInfo is also reporting an unusually high read response time. I've tried several software fixes without success, and I'm worried the drive may be failing because it contains important files. What should I do to protect and recover my data before replacing the drive?
3 Answers
The drive is probably failing, especially since the SMART information shows abnormal read performance. Stop writing to it and avoid repair commands such as CHKDSK for now, since stressing a failing drive can make recovery harder. First copy the important files to another drive or cloud storage, starting with the most valuable data. If normal copying fails, use a recovery tool or consider professional data recovery.
Since it’s a secondary internal drive and still has plenty of free space, the problem probably isn’t that the disk is full. A nearly full hard drive can slow down, but it shouldn’t normally produce a SMART warning or extremely poor read response times. Treat the drive as unreliable, back up the data, and plan to replace it.
Try copying the files in small batches to another disk, beginning with irreplaceable documents and photos. Don’t run disk cleanup, defragmentation, duplicate-file removal, or other programs that scan and write heavily to the drive until the backup is complete. Once the data is safe, replace the hard drive.
It’s an internal hard drive, not an external USB one. I’m mainly trying to figure out how to disable whatever is causing the constant 100% usage without risking the files.