Tuesday, March 16, 2021

100% disk usage on SSD and system freezes on Windows 10

I'm no ordinary Windows user. I boot the system, I play some Doom Eternal, play some VR and then I'm rebooting to Linux.
When I bought my current PC last year in March I haven't noticed it really but everytime I install something, my computer freezed. Not even Discord is reacting on keystrokes. It's weird and only occured under Windows.

At the moment I'm booting Windows more often as I'm playing around with development for VR and my headset is not supported on Linux. (Not a lot are anyway...)

And it keeped getting onto my nerves so I investigated with procexp64.exe and the task manager. The disk usage of my system was pretty much always at 100% during the freezes. But why is the I/O that high If no actual data is requested?

TL;DR

Then I finally found the solution here. It turned out that the Microsoft driver StorAHCI.sys has an issue with some SATA controllers if MSI is enabled. It can be disabled with regedit.

If you suffer from the same issue, maybe the provided link will also help you. I'm writing these lines to increase the odds that the next stranger will find this faster than me.