100% SSD HDD PC Lockup / freezes my top 5 Solutions for Windows

[Umbrella]

Long story:
I recently installed a new SSD I was given from a friend, very nice gift & a great friend. I got it up & working no problems as a 2nd drive, a storage device. I honestly had no issues with it. My bud / friend, he suggested me to install my OS on it for overall better system stability & performance. I agreed. I started the process, backed up files, formatted the drive & got win 10 clean installed on my new SSD. I had to fix my own problem & did research online. Here is to hoping if anyone eles had or has this issue, I hope all this can help!

Long story short & down to the problem:
My SSD would lockup, at first, I had no idea it was my OS or SSD. I tried to find more information while trying to solve this issue. I caught it a couple times only if I had taskmanager pre loaded before the stutter happened. I began doing some digging, process wouldn't show anything, resource monitor, nothing. Event viewer, again, nothing... I searched online & asked about. It was very difficult to fix this problem.

For me, the #1 Solution is what had solved my issue. This took me some time to fix & almost had to refunded the SSD. Any application like Chrome or Origin would cause the system to lockup & freeze. Games worked fine but blizzard app or steam, app's essentially would lockup & unfreeze shortly after loading without errors. It didn't happen every time or right away, it could happen at random making this difficult to re-create.

Be sure your windows is upto date & SSD is upto date before wasting time on solutions that could help or just end up wasting time. I tried my best to write this out to guide all OS of Windows. This is not just for windows 10. Please remember, these are only idea's & suggestions that could help solve SSD or HDD lockups.

Image:
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/411214951911391232/741849368331812994/lockups.jpg

Image2:
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/411214951911391232/742184726412132432/lockups2.jpg





Solution 1:
Check the little things!
This can also be the most over looked. Double check connections! Follow these steps! This can be the easiest fix known to hardware malfunctions is re-socketing, adjusting, cleaning.
Believe it or not, these steps had worked for me!

What are the known issues or symptoms?
100% disk activity like shown in the image I took above. You may notice your mouse working still & no BSOD = Blue screen of death. If you try to rush information during the lockup, you can cause app's to crash or not respond. You may also notice broken TEXT in APP's that are running or broken images.


Steps:
1: Be sure you installed the SSD correctly with a good SATA cable. This could result in replacing the cable itself. (Try a different cable)

2: Do a "Dust check or Dust Sweep", be sure everything is clean & nothing in the socket or port.

3: Be sure you have it in the proper MB Ports. Port 0 to 3 is normally good, port 4 & 5 or your last two ports might be slower or support older devices.






Solution 2:
Page file system memory!
If you have not setup you're virtual memory yet. I recommend doing so. If you have issues, this could be the solution for you! Paging can also solve other issues for very demanding software or games that require virtual memory.

What are the known issues or symptoms?
If you have app's randomly close or crash, soundFX crackling during fast scrolling or multitasking. Out of memory errors both virtual & physical. Flashing of screen, desktop, background, taskbar or notice minor lockups & freeze's either with app's, OS or mouse while loading or playing heavy / intense apps.


Steps:
1: Open your "control panel" on any windows OS & click "view" & select small or large view in the top right corner.

2: Click "System" than click "Advanced system setting"

3: Click the "Advanced" TAB located at the top, click "settings..." in the performance section.

4: Click the "Advanced" TAB again in the new window, than, select "Change..." in Virtual memory section.


SIDENOTE:
Before following step 5, please keep in mind your settings might be different. You can enable more virtual memory on the SSD if you think it doesn't have enough & test that first before disabling paging on the SSD. The SSD is much faster & you should do as much heavy lifting with it as you can. This means, It's recommend using the SSD as the page file disk for performance reasons. 


5: Uncheck "Automatically manage paging file size" You must either disable SSD paging or set "CUSTOM" for 800 min & 1000 MAX
I recommend setting up paging on your SSD or the next fastest HDD you own & allocate at least 1000 min & 2000 max.

Look online to find out more info on how to allocate set amounts based off the physical RAM that's on your machine. Quick suggestions below.
8GB RAM  Set Min 4000 & Max 8000
16GB RAM Set Min 8000 & Max 16000


6: Reboot & give it a whirl!






Solution 3:
Clean your computer of bugs & problems. Use CCleaner & run command prompt commands!

What are the known issues or symptoms?
Pretty much anything funky or abnormal that shouldn't be happening.


Option 1: If the SSD isn't a clean install, you may have malware or a virus or a bug of some sort. To confirm, you must get anti virus software & check your system. I've noticed many recommendations on CCleaner while solving my own issues. It didn't fix mine, but, it could fix yours! Give it a shot.


Option 2: Windows security or other anti security software. Run any antivirus software you have or trust to check & clean your system!


Option 3: Run command prompt in admin & type "sfc /scannow" to check windows for corrupted files
Ask google how-to open command prompt on your windows OS & be sure to run it with admin.






Solution 4:
Changing settings or Updating with BIOS?
This could be difficult or very easy, but, your gonna have to do research on your motherboard to figure out how. This is a last case scenario.

What are the known issues or symptoms?
SSD or HDD or other hardware disconnecting or losing power but comes back shortly after. OS fails to boot with the SSD &/or isn't visible.


1: Get the motherboard name & search online to find updates. Check the bios frimware version to confirm if your upto date. This can normally be found in the bios menu when you first startup your PC. You'll need to spam a key on startup such as "DEL" or "F12". At startup, the logo & keys are shown on screen.


2: Be sure its not a setting within bios that could be causing problems. Most people recommend AHCI boot settings. Ask google how to check with your motherboards bios to see this setting. Try searching like this = "How-to enable AHCI on YOURMOTHERBOARDNAME"


3: Did you confirm you needed an update? Install the new frimware via USB. Most cases, you'll be doing this & will require a thumb drive to install the new update. Go into boot manager & select the USB device to install the bios update.





Solution 5:
Keep digging for answers online or get a refund!

This is no joke, you might actually need to get a refund. The SSD could have something wrong.Keep a eye on that refund policy & keep trying your luck before time is out. You might find another solution if you keep digging....




Last Edit reasons?:
Fixed spelling
Updated context
Added a 2nd image.
Added long story short.

[xSOSxHawkens]

Buy a new drive with a return window. If its the drive (likely) then the new one solves it and you are golden. If its not the drive you can return the drive and be out nothing but time, but benefit in knowing its not the drive at that point and can look at other parts.

Chances are high its the drive.

[TheKyoshiroFan]

Hi all, appology for resurrecting an old thread, but I am getting desperate and need advice before spending money on something that might not even solve the issue.
I am unsure if I have the exact same issue as the OP, but at least pretty similar, so please let me describe what happened.

Some context:
I am using the same PC for 8 years now,
Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-6700 CPU @ 3.40GHz
16GB RAM
GTX 1060 6GB
hardware-wise the only thing that I changed was: replacing 3 years ago the 256GB SSD where my windows is installed to a new same sized SSD, and changed my old HDD to a 2TB HDD 2 years ago. (I also have another 2TB HDD that is 6 years old but it should be unrelated).
I only have my windows and some programs like norton antivirus, browsers, image-, video-, music- etc -programs on my SSD. Everything else, including steam, my documents, my desktop etc is on my HDD.
1 year ago (HDD was also 1 year old) I started experiencing some issues, (NOTE: before describing them, I think it's good to note that I got my PC physically cleaned and dedusted, where then I started getting random blue screens of death, after i think changing some cables and nudging them arround, the random blue screen issues stopped and haven't had it since, a black cable or maybe more ws changed by a friend that I will mention further down, just wanted to include this blue screen fact as it might be relevant), now to the main issue, at around that time, where as the OP described, would bring my HDD usage to 100%, according to the Task Manager it is at 100% active time, 0ms Average response time, 0KB/s Read an Write speeds (I saw someone not believing this can happen, but alas it is real). At that time no screenshot can be made since it basically freezes the pc, I can still open a browser or anything that is on the C drive, but after a minute that also freezes and the PC basically bricks, nothing happening. At that 100% Disk usage time, the cpu, memory, other disks, ethernet and gpu graphs continue moving normally.
Mostly this freeze is permanent and I need to shut down the PC with the physical power button, sometimes very rarely the freeze lasts between 3 seconds and 4 minutes and is not permanent. The 4 minutes example was when playing Titan's Quest, where I clicked to move, everything freezes, and when after 4 minutes it unfreezed, everything moves at double the speed for 2-3 seconds.
After the PC restart, usually windows tells me there is an issue with my disk, it needs to get scanned and repaired, but it can't be done directly, so I need to restart and it does the chkdsk command on the beginning black loading screen, usually repairing something.
In the Event Viewers, I mostly see entries like
Found 0x2 clusters allocated to file "\Games\Steam\config\config.vdf <0x14,0x61dff>" at offset "0" marked as free
... repaired online.
OR
Found corrupt basic file structure for "\Games\Steam\appcache\stats\UserGameStatsSchema_226840.bin <0x2,0x61e61>"
... queued for offline repair.
Attribute record of type 0x80 and instance tag 0x3 is cross linked
starting at 0x201128b for possibly 0x1 clusters.

Basically all errors were somewhere with some files of Steam. After the repair, everything seems to work fine for a couple of days and then the same thing happens again out of the blue, this escalated so much at one point, that some files on my HDD started getting corrupted, where I end up with empty files like music or image files, not only confined to steam, and those were files from different times, in different folders and places.
I immediately (well, after 1 year of suffering and noticing files get corrupted) took an older HDD 1TB from a friend and cloned all the content to that disk to prevent further loss.
(An importnat note here, very recently, like a week ago, another PC expert friend of mine told me some internet providers have shields/blockers, who make so all the internet traffic goes through them, thus them blocking a part of the steam updates and thus corrupting steam and then corrupting the disk and leading to the forced bricks and leading to the restarts, might be improtant?).

The friend who cleans my pc and provided the cable came to my house again and used Hard Disk Sentinel, showing the disk was 100% healthy with no issue whatsoever, I even tried using the waranty, they checked it there too and said nothing is wrong with it, so, we did a full format on the disk and i cloned back all the files from the older HDD to the actual one and I had no issues for a whole year. AMAZING!

Please note, this is the short version, since this issue was ongoing from 2 years ago until 1 year ago, I had a lot of vidoes, error logs, screenshots, I even used the older HDD with the cloned content and never had any issue with it, thus believeing it was the 2TB HDD, I get my pc de-dusted and cleaned once in 4 months, so it could be that there is some issue with the cables, who knows, as mentioned with the blue screen above, however I use the same cable that is connected to the faulty 2TB, with the old friend HDD, since I don't have more slots)

Present day:
As i mentioned, after the full format and cloning everything back to my 2TB HDD, I didn't have any issues for the past year (still AMAZING), now 3 weeks ago I moved to a new appartment, everything was working fine for 3 days and then the old story started repeating. The disk suddently got to 100% usage (and I forgot to mention it does some strange tshik tshik tshik sound when the PC starts or when the freeze occurs, that's when I know it will mess up), well, this time I was prepared, I took out my older HDD that I still keep from my friend, cloned everything over, did a full format on my 2TB HDD over night, and cloned everything back, since that worked last time and I didn't have any issues for a year... ... ... however to my dismay, after 3-4 days, the issue appeared again, full formatting and cloning over seemed not to work anymore. In addition, my 1TB friend HDD also got this issue 1-2 times, which NEVER happened before, thus making me believe it is not entirely my 2TB HDD (the 2TB one still got this issue 40+ times, but having the old HDD that never had that issue before was discouraging, though after these 1-2 times, the old HDD doesn't have issues anymore again).

What TS has been done:
-Windows 10 update (You're up to date)
-sfc scan to fix/repair windows (doing it until it sais no errors found)
-error checking on the disk (which leads to chkdsk being run if it finds errors, after which no error)
-Optimize and defragment disk (is 0%)
-Disabling steam auto-start, everything works, when starting steam (or after using steam for a while), it bricks (sometimes), I had an interval of 1 week where no issue
-Reinstalled steam, by deleting all files except game files and steam.exe
- Completely removed anything steam related from the registry by entering the regedit (following a steam guide where to find all entries) and then installing steam through installer
-Made sure to do the exact same things every day to see if some of my actions cause the issue, -> no, issue usually happens when starting the pc on a new day, where nothing special was dont the previous day -> appears to be "Random" if it will brick or not, but the issues occur when some games have updates or steam tires to download something

What TS has NOT been done:
- completely open the pc and check every single cable and connection (I only nudge the 2 cables, the black and the colorful one, which are on the HDD sides)
- buy a completely new pc (please see below**)
- reinstall windows (please see below**)
- do anything with the bios
- probalbyt anythign else that is not mentioned here that I don't know of.

Conclusion for now:
This issue occurst periodically after a few days, I need to restart the pc tenths of times if it occurs, switch between my 1TB and 2TB HDD, and suddenly evertyhign works fine as if there was no issue whatsoever, until some days pass, in which the same issue repeats once again. Heck, today everything started working fine and normal, but after 3 hours in Mighty Party (yes, I play it, pls don't judge me), after clicking on my army, my HDD froze to 100% again but this time for 2 minutes (at least I didn't have to button shut down my pc like I usually have to) and everything continued working, but I bet you, if I shut down my PC normally now and start it tomorrow, It won't start again and I would need to restart multiple times and maybe chkdsk and all that good stuff again.

** I was now planning to buy a new 256GB SSD and reinstall my windows once again, and buy a 2TB SSD as well to replace my current HDD, in hopes it is some wicked combination between windows and this particular HDD that causes the issue, but after reading this thread here, I am starting to doubt if this will help and I am not eager to spend 200 EUR on 2 new SSDs for nothing and reinstlal the windows. I can try to completely dedust my PC as the OP suggested as step 1 and check all cables and connectors, but neitehr me, nor anyone I know who is good with PCs, nor as I see most of you here have seen such a strange phenomenon. One would expect either something is always working, or something is broken and the same issue happens, this "today it will work, tomorrow it won't, then the next day after uncountable restarts it will fix itself again" procedure is very tolling on my nerves and psyche and I really don't know what to do anymore.

THe Hard Disk Sentinel result now is:
All 3 HDD, both my nromal 2TB, the 6 year old one I barely mention, and the old friend 1TB HDD all show 100% Performance and Health
The 256GB SSD shows 100% Performance and 96% Health
TRIP feature supported and enabled.
S.M.A.R.T. attribute: #177 Wear Leveling Count
No actions needed

If anyone wants to suggest something or needs further any info that I have left out (probably a lot of such), let me know, I will try to provide it. I was hoping I can use this PC for 2-3 more years until I buy a new win11 compatible one.

Thank you.

1st EDIT reson: added "What TS has NOT been done" section
2nd EDIT: included Hard Disk Sentinel result

[Bad 💀 Motha]

Also if you ever copy large amounts from SSD to HDD (faster drive to slower drive) when something like WinOS shows it has being complete, look in Task Manager and look at the drive you copied to. See if it's still writing. It most likely is not actually done yet. And if this is the case for your scenario, then you'd want to avoid doing something that could hurt that process or the data; such as a Sleep, Hibernate, Restart, Shutdown, Disk Defrag, CHKDSK, or drive benchmark

Disable...
Sysmain service
Prefetching in Registry
Windows Search service
Indexing for each drive
Disk Defrag scheduling
OneDrive

Set PageFile manually...
Always set to the OS Drive
MIN: 8192 (8GB)
MAX: 1.5X your installed RAM; so if 32GB RAM; set this to 49152 (48GB)

Keep 50-100GB free on the OS SSD.

Disable Fast Startup + Hibernate via CMD (Run As Admin)
POWERCFG -H OFF
Turning off Hibernation will free up a few GB of disk space; for example if you have 32GB installed RAM, your Hibernation temp file is taking up 24GB of disk space on C Drive.

[TheKyoshiroFan]

Hi all.

引用自 Bad 💀 Motha：

Also if you ever copy....

Thank you for the info, that is unfortunately not the case when it happens to me, I am not copying anything. However yes, when I was cloning my disk, I did notice short such times where it reaches 100% and I hear it stops, but thats for 1 second and it resumes (since I assume both disks on cloning, one is a bit slower than the other thus one needs to stop to let the other catch up).
My issue happens when I am basically playing a game or even being idle in a game and suddenly. If needed, I can provide a downlaod link to a 1min video which I took with my phone where one can see yesterday's occurence of the issue.

An important update from today , I started the PC, and it was stuck for 5+ mins on the windows black screen with the loading circle, as if it can't load (no welcome or login screen), don't forget, my desctop is on my HDD and not where windows is, so I used physical button, turn it off, then turn on, it then loaded that time into my desctop, however the desctop had no icons whatsoever and only ctrl+alt+del combo worked, nothing else, not even normal shut down, so I turned off the PC with a button again.
Then I opened it, I took out the black and color cable from my HDD (i think those are the power and the transfer cables) for a second, then plugged them back in and now eerything again is working perfectly and today I didn't have any 100% freezes yet.

This is a very good chance what the OP posted is true, I will get my PC fully dismantled and cleaned this weekend and will check all cables, as it seems it might indeed be some power/connection issue :O

I will keep this updated for now.

[TheKyoshiroFan]

Today's update, everything was running fine since yesterday's information, Norton did do some background antivirus checks while idle.
What I did is, I tried doing a quick scan with it, and when it started scanning my Windows drive, my 2TB HDD went to 100% 0/0/0 and everything froze.
Then I did the usual restarts from the button 4 times, but nothing workes, as in, either I got a windows endless loading screen in the beginning, or I was getting an empty desktop.
I had to replace that 2TB HDD with the old friend 1TB HDD (which are still identical clones of eachother, steam just had to download some updates on some games), windows booted up without an issue, I turned it off normally, switched to my 2TB again and now everything once again is working as if nothing happened, I tried Norton quick scan to see if that was the casue but no, everything was fine, I did Error Checking on the HDD and it said no errors found... On 11th Okt. I will get my PC dedusted and cleaned and will see if this will somehow help.
It seems when my 2TB gets this 100% usage, and I have to turn off the PC with the button, it has issues starting with that HDD in, I have to either disconnect it or connect the other identical HDD for the PC to boot normally, and after that I put the HDD in and everything works again.

[Bad 💀 Motha]

What do you even need Norton for? It's just more bloatware junk

[Annihilator]

But about freeze mean on windows or on games? I have a mini freeze on the division 2 but no one solved, ubisoft or forums, about it from years and i have changed the computer and formatted also with that time. Only the cable and ssd i not changed but i changed the directory of the games and windows for testing but no fixed it.

引用自 Bad 💀 Motha：

What do you even need Norton for? It's just more bloatware junk

I used it :) i know the people not like it.

[Bad 💀 Motha]

Try a different sata data cable

[andreasaspenberg575]

formatting an already formatted drive can cause issues. i once experienced that when i formatted my harddrive and reinstalled windows, i could not get in, because of an unknown password.

[TheKyoshiroFan]

Hi all, tomorrow is the day where I will get my pc phiscially cleaned and de-dusted to see if it will have any result, also, today is the 3rd day, where I had no issues/freezes whatsoever, even though I didn't do anything different. I only noticed in those 3 days, neither Steam, nor any of the games had any updates, so maybe that is important.

引用自 Bad 💀 Motha：

What do you even need Norton for? It's just more bloatware junk

Well, I have almost nothing else as of programs, so it doesn't get bloated that much, and having a layer of protection is always nice.

引用自 Annihilator：

But about freeze mean on windows or on games?

That is what I try to figure out, what casues the disk to go to 100% usage without it reading/writing.

引用自 Bad 💀 Motha：

Try a different sata data cable

Good call, today I will get the guy to bring a new SATA cable to test.

引用自 andreasaspenberg575：

formatting an already formatted drive can cause issues.

Before doing the 2nd format in a short time, the disk was already half written with data, so it wasn't a format on an already clean formatted, so no such issue arose for me.

[Annihilator]

引用自 TheKyoshiroFan：

Hi all, tomorrow is the day where I will get my pc phiscially cleaned and de-dusted to see if it will have any result, also, today is the 3rd day, where I had no issues/freezes whatsoever, even though I didn't do anything different. I only noticed in those 3 days, neither Steam, nor any of the games had any updates, so maybe that is important.

引用自 Bad 💀 Motha：

What do you even need Norton for? It's just more bloatware junk

Well, I have almost nothing else as of programs, so it doesn't get bloated that much, and having a layer of protection is always nice.

引用自 Annihilator：

But about freeze mean on windows or on games?

That is what I try to figure out, what casues the disk to go to 100% usage without it reading/writing.

引用自 Bad 💀 Motha：

Try a different sata data cable

Good call, today I will get the guy to bring a new SATA cable to test.

引用自 andreasaspenberg575：

formatting an already formatted drive can cause issues.

Before doing the 2nd format in a short time, the disk was already half written with data, so it wasn't a format on an already clean formatted, so no such issue arose for me.

In my case is only on one game.

[andreasaspenberg575]

specific games have specific requirements but, this suggests that it is not your SSD but something else.

[Annihilator]

引用自 andreasaspenberg575：

specific games have specific requirements but, this suggests that it is not your SSD but something else.

Ah ok but i have a 4090 and 14700k dubt is my computer :)

[andreasaspenberg575]

then it could be your cpu. the modern intel cpus have had instabilities lately.

[Annihilator]

引用自 andreasaspenberg575：

then it could be your cpu. the modern intel cpus have had instabilities lately.

I have got a problem with cpu and retired 2 about it but this seems work because i tested it with programs. Other cpu crash directly in all games but this only in one. Also from day one.