# Disk usage is ridiculously high for games



## Festivshane (Aug 3, 2015)

I recently upgraded to windows 10 and ever since then, when using games, I get absurd amounts of lag. In my situation the game is Call of Duty : Advanced Warfare. I will be playing lag free and then (usually when I get in a enemy encounter. Or as soon as the bullets go flying) I will get an insane amount of lag. I will go from 90FPS to 6FPS in a matter of seconds and it will persist until the fight is over(usually rendering me the looser of the fight). While the game was running full force, I checked the task manager to see what the heck was the cause of this lag. Apparently, it was displaying 100% disk usage, however not from CoD, it was from a system task named "System". This task was using approximately 2 gigabytes of memory and 9Mb/s of my disk (which is obliviously not the max my disk can handle.) My hard drive is capable of way more than 9Mb/s But according to task manager that "System" task alone was using 80% or so of disk, and the overall disk usage was at 100%. I right clicked on "System" and clicked properties to find the exact culprit. The application was "ntoskrnl.exe" located inside of System32. I can only think of one "Disk related change" that I made prior to all the lag issues. That would be defragging. I defragged the disk the day before just for the heck of it and after that is when I noticed the lag. I don't see how this could be the culprit but I wanted to mention it in case it was of any importance to fixing this issue. I should also mention that I was getting no lag on CoD prior to the defrag(this is just a guess. and it wasn't like I noticed the lag minutes after the defrag so its unlikely that that is the prime factor in my problem.) My computer is a 3000$ PC with more than enough performance for any game thrown at it. I have a 8GB Radeon R9 295x2 (a card intended for 4K, but I am running it on a 1440p) so I highly doubt its a hardware issue. 

OK OK, a lot of info, so I hope it all made sense.

Anyways, my PC specs:
- Intel i7 5820K 3.30GHz Overclocked to 4GHz with liquid cooling
- Radeon R9 295x2 8GB Graphics Card Watercooled
- 1000W PSU
- 2TB SSHD 

What I want (In Short):
- How to downgrade to Windows 8.1 if there are no other options
- How to fix the issue
- When the issue will be fixed?
- Is it a windows problem or a game optimization problem?
- Any other wise thoughts or recommendations you may have.


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## barnnyardd (Mar 16, 2003)

Festivshane,Welcome to TSG. You should check but as far as what I know you are not suppose to defrag solid state hard drives. Bob


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## Ent (Apr 11, 2009)

Bob is right that you shouldn't normally need to defrag SSDs, simply because they don't have a physical read head that has to look for all the fragments.

On topic, you might be interested in this.
http://superuser.com/questions/849103/high-disk-usage-with-windows-8-1


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## Festivshane (Aug 3, 2015)

Its a SSHD (Solid State Hybrid Drive) it caches commonly used files in a smaller 10-20 GB SSD built in to improve loading times of the things you use most, but 2000GB of it is hard disk.


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