Windows 10 100% Disk Usage after Startup

I'm also using the Dell Inspiron 15R SE and the Samsung M8 is very slow (5400rpm) drive.

The data about the 100% usage come from the disk controller (Microsoft explained it in the video at 6m55 seconds). The disk controller tells Windows that the drive is busy doing so many operations and Windows displays it in the taskmanager graph.

I "solved" by replacing the HDD with a SSD (Crucial MX100). To have more space, I used a HDD caddy in the DVD slot and use here the old M8 HDD to store data, while the SSD hold Windows + all programs.

Attention, make sure you buy a HDD caddy with a jumper, otherwise you may run into ACPI.sys issues which can't be fixed. Changing the jumper can fix it.

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For performance and stability reasons, use the SDD in the slot where the HDD was and use the HDD in the caddy.


Intel Rapid Storage technlogy was causing the bad performance for me. 100% disk usage for 5-10 minutes after Windows 10 boot.

The problem seems to be the Link Power Management. If enabled, it causes extra delays for many disk operations. I am not sure if this is related to Samsung ST1000LM024 disk or Dell Inspiron 23 5348 specifically, but when I disabled the setting, I got my normal performance back!

Start Intel Rapid control center, go to performance tab and disable the link power managemet and you are done.