100% activity slow comp

[Bj Baxter]

Hi I have a custom alienware m17x r5 and latly the hdd activity sits on 100% after running fine for 25 - 30 mins then its slow till its restarted. at start up the hdds and ssd show up in the task manager but while running slow they dont show up at all in the task manager. I have run seatools and they all passed but once activity goes up I cant even open seatools, aslo trying to view computer management/ disk management shows nothing. this all started after on day I turned it on and it beeped 6 times (video card). I restarted it and it booted fine. 20 mins later its slow and has been like that after every boot since. I ran malwarebytes and it removed 28 threats but no improvement. tried disabling superfetch and windows search like other places suggested but to no avail even when reinabled. even did a full reinstall of win 10 pro and the problem persists. this is not good since I cant do my game design course on it.

Any help would be awsome and much appreciated.

Specs are
Intel i7 4900mq 2.80ghz with turbo mode on 3.2ghz
32gb ram 1600mhz
M780 4gb video card
Hdd configuration
Msata 64gb ssd(os)
2× wd black 750gb in raid 0
Win 10 pro x64

 

[DelJo63]

Try turning Windows Update startup mode to DISABLE and then STOP the service; Reboot

 

[Bj Baxter]

Done.
Will update soon

 

[Bj Baxter]

Unfortunately no luck 33 mins in and it starts again

 

[DelJo63]

What AV product are you using - - is it updating signatures?

 

[Bj Baxter]

No av yet fresh install of windows as far as I know it should be updating signitures. previous windows I eas was running iobit advanced system care and malwarebytes.

 

[Bj Baxter]

Just a little update. I removed the raid hdds and turned the comp on and it been a few hours and the activity is normal. im leaning towards a faulty hdd right now. will update again in a few hours after testing them both for a short time

 

[DelJo63]

Check the S.M.A.R.T data for each

 

[Bj Baxter]

According to sea tools all S.M.A.R.T services passed and are enabled. after several hours of testing I found the 2nd HDD in my raid 0 was faulty. I removes the HDD and removed the other from raid and added the HDD as a separate drive then added a separate SSD. so ar the laptops up time is at 1 hour 55 minutes and all 3 drive activities and remain under 5% at idle. the only other change I have seen was my CPU speed went from 3.2GHz to 3.66GHz since changing the HDD's around.

I'm not 100% sure if you could call this solved as I didn't think a failing secondary HDD setup could lock a system up like that

 

[DelJo63]

Heavy IO can create a massive load of Interrupts, which induces task switching and the OS gets real busy servicing the OS and not the user.

Good work on your part to hunt down the root cause. BRAVO.

 

[DelJo63]

May I ask, are you using an onboard raid controller or an external enclosure? I would expect the enclosure to not have exhibited this behavior.

BTW, MS discourages using RAID for the boot drive.

 

[Bj Baxter]

Onboard raid controller... was used as storage and 64gb msata ssd used as OS

 

[DelJo63]

Onboard raid controller... was used as storage and 64gb msata ssd used as OS

We're in sync. If the RAID is really important to you, consider an enclosure which supports HOT SWAP (that will be SCSI and not STA) and the RAID-1 or 5 will manage itself with such heavy impact to the system.

 

[Bj Baxter]

Sweet I will keep that in mind. cheers again for help and advice. the raid setup was the factory default when I got the laptop. luckily my home server backed up all my study work and assesments before the hdd died. In relation to the enclosure setup. Would the raid handle the 2 or more HOT SWAP 4tb SSHD NAS drives?

 

[DelJo63]

You would need to shop for the specific; my guess would be SSD+Hotswap would be rare if any.