Causes of High Disk Usage on Windows 10
There are several potential causes for high disk usage in Windows 10, but most come down to the same basic idea: Too many things are running for the computer to handle. One common cause is swapping or paging. Swapping occurs when a computer runs out of physical memory (RAM) and needs more space to store information about the running processes and applications. It uses a file on the hard drive called swapfile.sys to hold it. As Windows works with that information, it constantly reads and writes to swapfile.sys, driving up disk usage. You also might find that applications that search through or use many files at once access the hard drive at an alarming rate behind the scenes. Many applications can behave this way, including antivirus software and some utilities that are installed with Windows.
How to Fix High Disk Usage on Windows 10
Most of the time, the fixes for high disk usage come down to finding the process that uses the hard drive frequently and stopping it. Below are a few of the most common solutions. To change permissions, right-click Skype.exe in C:\Program Files (x86)\Skype\Phone, then go to the Security tab and select Edit. Next, choose All Application Packages, then select the Write check box under Allow. Finally, to close, select OK. First, check that your computer has the AHCI driver by opening the Device Manager and looking at the item IDE ATA/ATAPI. If you see SATA AHCI Controller, open it and select Properties. Under the Driver tab, choose Driver Details. Here, look for the driver storahci.sys. If you see it, then your PC could be susceptible to this known bug. If you discovered that the storahci.sys driver file is on your system, change its value in the Registry Editor. Go to Details in Device Manager and choose the Device instance path from the drop-down menu. From here, copy the value listed and paste it into a text editor like Notepad. Next, open Regedit and browse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Enum\PCI. Expand the folder of the value you saved in a text editor. Inside this folder, open Device Parameters\Interrupt Management\MessageSignaledInterruptProperties, double-click MSISupported, and change its value to 0.
