I've been struggling with my PC for almost a year now, as it randomly freezes and spikes to 100% disk usage without warning. I've tried a bunch of troubleshooting steps like disabling unnecessary services, adjusting startup apps, tweaking virtual memory settings, reinstalling Windows, and even upgraded to Windows 11. I've checked the health of my drive and it seems fine, plus all my drivers are up to date. I ran an antivirus scan that detected some Macintosh malware, which I quarantined and removed. Despite these efforts, my SSD still hits 100% usage—it's better at startup but whenever I launch a game like GTA 5 online, it freezes up again. I could really use some advice on what else to try!
2 Answers
Hitting 100% disk usage can be normal at times, especially during gaming, but it might indicate an issue related to the game rather than your hardware. Here are a few things you could try:
1. Check the video settings for GTA 5 and see if there are threads about rebuilding its game cache online. Some games build shader caches which can cause high disk activity if they're corrupt.
2. Be aware that certain game patches can lead to a lot of disk activity as they rebuild parts of the game. It's worth checking specific guides for GTA 5 on this.
3. If you're playing on high settings or resolutions, it could be that you're maxing out your video RAM and relying on disk space instead. Try lowering your resolution or setting the graphics to medium and see if that helps.
Also, if this issue only pops up with GTA 5, there’s a chance you could have a mod-related malware. If you’re using Steam, running a file integrity check or even reinstalling the game could fix it!
Could you share your specs? If you have too little RAM, your system might be using the SSD or HDD for paging (using the disk as virtual RAM), which could be causing the issues you're experiencing. 16GB of DDR4 should usually be enough, but if it's set to a low amount or there's something misconfigured, that could definitely lead to problems. Let me know what your full specs are, and we can figure out if that’s the issue!
I'll gather my specs and share them soon! Just to clarify, if my RAM is sufficient, is there a way to adjust settings to prevent the disk from being used like RAM?