HDD / SSD Spikes

[Brian Dutkiewicz]

My girlfriend recently bought a Lenovo Ideapad Y410 about 2 months ago and has had nothing but problems. She was telling me that the performance of the laptop was not up to par and would take forever for applications and programs to launch. I consider myself an amateur when it comes to fixing advanced computer problems. After looking at it and going through the steps (driver updates, hard drive checks for errors, system updates, etc.) I figured it had to be something else.

I noticed that the computer has two hard drive drives. It has a HDD drive and a SSD drive. When launching a program such as Steam or even Chrome the SSD drive would spike to 100% and lock the computer. Sometimes it will unlock and I would be able to continue at other times I would have to give it a hard reset. There aren’t too many other people posting about this issue and I was wondering if there is a fix to this problem. It seems that the SSD is doing all the work while the HDD is idle. Any information will help. Thanks!

 

[techgeek]

Lets address you last statement first. As far as the HDD remaining idle, and the SSD doing all the work is most likely Windows and most of the applications are installed on the SSD. So it's the SSD that's being accessed the most. The HDD is likely a storage device and maybe the user files and some applications on it.

As for the SSD spiking to 100% and locking the computer that is concerning. I have seen the same behavior from failing HDD's where the OS was trying to access the HDD and the HDD was unable to respond (usually hear clicking when this happened) and then it all of a sudden started to work. It was completely random, but most often would occur when opening a new application or closing one down. That said though, maybe some basic troubleshooting needs to be done before I start saying failing hardware. Have you done any sort of virus scanning. Viruses can cause this sort of behavior too. Try running MalwareBytes on it. Run the virus scanner that the computer has installed on it. If that doesn't find anything, then we can talk about running some benchmark and diagnostic software.