Hello CH! Been awhile!
Okay, so some background. I've had this PC for only a couple years, 3-4 maybe, pre-built from one of those companies that prebuilds for you (can't remember name, dad suggested it). For note, here are the specs:
MSI X99S SLI Krait Edition motherboard
i7-5820K @ 3.30GHz 6 core
16GB Ram
GTX 970
From what I remember, it ran decent enough in the beginning but I vaguely recall some complaints. Still as time has gone it's gone down hill and it's incredibly sluggish compared to the beginning, and even worse during games and such. Over the past couple of months, I've been researching guide after guide of tweaks and addressing the poor performance and also a 100% disk usage problem that I had noticed. While I've had some improvement, overall it's still slow. It boots up slow, transfers data slow, updates slow. I can still play most games with good framerate, although some stutter quite a bit and loading into maps and matches takes me forever.
I've watched my cpu temps under load, and I've never seen them being way too hot.
As I mentioned previously, disk usage has been a problem of regularly hitting 100%. I have spent a lot of time researching that specific problem and have had minor improvement, but not enough and not without some sacrifices that shouldn't have to be.
Pressing start/windows key sometimes doesn't work properly or often takes very long. Right clicking for context menu is the same and file explorer goes non responsive as often as nuns pray. I even have had times where loading UAC takes very long. In times where I've had super low performance, I've opened resource monitor and just watched under the disk section and and I find often that when I have some disk writes (particularly Chrome to the cache and System Volume Information) is when performance is slow, and when those finish, things seem to noticeably better, but never as good as they were in the beginning.
I do make sure my PC is often updated (I'm on version 1903) and I've reset my PC a few times over the years now (for one reason or another) and it's never seemed to have helped. I have run chkdsk and DISM, I have checked S.M.A.R.T. status using command prompt, it said my drive was OK. I have used Windows Defender to do scans, have never found anything and that doesn't surprise me, I am quite careful. I have only ever updated my graphics drivers though and none else (besides when they do via Windows Update).
All this is what's made me wonder, could I just be in desperate need of an SSD at this point? I plan on buying one this weekend for the improvement regardless and because I need the space, but I wonder if this is what's bottlenecking my PC and why it would do this after 3 years? This PC currently runs off of a single 1TB mechanical HDD that I've had since day 1. If not, is there anything you could recommend? I have tried almost everything ever suggested and had no luck.
I've posted this thread to other locations but almost all the replies don't bother reading and just tell me to buy an SSD and my problems will go away. Others have said that buying an SSD will only degrade it faster and mask the issue, not fix it, but weren't willing to help further investigate and try to resolve.
So I come here to the place that helped me when I was a panicked kid with a dying PC and a million questions in hope we can finally find a resolve to this. Sorry for the long post. Please let me know if I need to run any diagnostics or provide any more info that I may have forgot. I really appreciate any help I can get and hope we can get my PC running great again.
