Will buying this solve my issue? | 100% Disk Usage

[RavenTheGoddess]

I've been looking into getting a second hard drive for a while now and I saw this 1TB hard drive from amazon. The reason I'm looking into getting a secondary is because my main is only a 500GB and it's almost full (only about 70GB left and that's after deleting all of my unnecessary files.) The hard drive I'm looking at has what seems to run at 6Gb/s with a 128MB cache. All I know about it is that it's a Seagate Barracuda. My 500GB Hard Drive is a Seagate Barracuda 7200.11, 3Gb/s, 32MB Cache, and 7200 RPM.

The problem I have with my current hard drive is that it always maxes out to 100% after booting Windows, and will randomly spike to 100% for no reason. I still blame the Creators Update for this but maybe my hard drive just isn't meant to handle it.

With that out of the way, lets get on to my questions. Will adding this new hard drive resolve my 100% disk usage issue, or will only my main hard drive be maxed out while my secondary does nothing? Will I have to transfer every last file to the 1TB and use the 500GB as extra storage instead? Will completely transferring everything, including the system folders to the 1TB work or will I have to install Windows on the 1TB, boot from the 1TB drive, and move all of my personal files from the 500GB to the 1TB like I would with a USB device and then delete any partitions on my 500GB and reformat? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[PlasmaHam]

So, I've been doing some research, and it does appear that some recent Windows updates have been maxing out drives. Having only 70GB extra should not be causing you problems, I only have 20GBs left on my main hard drive, and I boot up fine. I can't give you a definite idea of what is wrong, there are apparently numerous things that could be affecting it, but here are some websites I found that list some possible solutions:

https://www.online-tech-tips.com/windows-10/troubleshoot-100-disk-usage-windows-10/

https://www.drivereasy.com/knowledge/fix-100-disk-usage-in-task-manager-improve-pc-performance-on-windows-10/

https://www.partitionwizard.com/partitionmagic/100-disk-usage-windows-10.html

If these don't work, there is the possibility that it is a hardware issue. If so, then I would heavily recommend you migrate your OS to a Solid State Drive (SSD). SSDs are faster and more reliable than spinning drives like what you have. This (https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-2-5-Inch-Internal-MZ-75E250B-AM/dp/B00OAJ412U?th=1) is what I use. It looks to be atleast twice as fast as your 500GB drive, so moving to that would likely solve your problem, and result in overall increased PC speeds.

With that out of the way, lets get on to my questions. Will adding this new hard drive resolve my 100% disk usage issue, or will only my main hard drive be maxed out while my secondary does nothing? Will I have to transfer every last file to the 1TB and use the 500GB as extra storage instead? Will completely transferring everything, including the system folders to the 1TB work or will I have to install Windows on the 1TB, boot from the 1TB drive, and move all of my personal files from the 500GB to the 1TB like I would with a USB device and then delete any partitions on my 500GB and reformat? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Onto those questions. First off, no, adding that second hard drive would not help your disk usage. The main disk is maxing out because the Windows OS that is installed on it is pulling too much data. Adding another drive wouldn't change that. Secondly, there are numerous software tools you can use to transfer your Windows software to another hard drive with minimal difficulty. I've used EaseUS Todo Backup (https://www.easeus.com/backup-utility/migrate-windows-10-to-ssd.html) to transfer data from a slow hard drive unto a quick ssd. Just hook up the hard drive you want to transfer to on the same PC as the original (I used an external port, but you can also hook it up directly), download the transfer software, and with it you can easily create partitions, and transfer your OS and data to a new drive. You can then wipe your original drive, and use it as a extra storage, as it should work fine in that capacity.

[RavenTheGoddess]

With that SSD, I'd be getting a lot less space, so I'd probably have to keep all my personal files and Windows on the SSD (and back up saved games) and reinstall my games from Steam since those are what take up the majority of my space, but keeping them on the hard drive might take away the performance boost I so badly need for games especially with the disk usage, not to mention my hard drive is a ticking time bomb anyway given it's model and age (it's anywhere from 9-10 years old, it's basically older than the oldest parts I have) so if that goes, I'd be losing a lot of data and potential space. I'll try those three links first, but I'd really like to avoid going to SSD for as long as I can because they are a lot more costly than regular hard drives and for less space, but I can see why people get them and why they're good.

The disk usage isn't as bad as it used to be though, the main problem I have is startup time. It takes about 2 minutes to reach the lock screen, and another minute for everything to load in, followed by another minute of high disk usage as it tries to "warm up" as I used to call it. After that though, the disk usage drops down to anywhere from 0-10% idle and only spikes to 100% when I start a game, even on Terraria, with the exception of Undertale. I found that the first thing that really helped my disk usage was opening resmon and disabling anything GeForce Experience related since that tends to cause a process called "System" to have high disk usage. Method 3 could also be my problem (from the first link) since I only have 6GB of ram so it probably pushes it all to my disk to save ram for other processes instead, causing the slow startup times and such, but I find it to be quite difficult to find good DDR3 ram and I don't really know if that's the issue anyway. I could probably buy another 4GB Stick made by A Tech since it saves on price and will bump it up to 8GB but I'm not sure if that'll be enough. Ram is really expensive these days, I notice. I'll also try the option under the power plan settings in case that might help me. I'll reply later with my success or failure in attempting the solutions in the links. Thanks :)

[Thomas4391]

Unfortunately Windows 10 is a pain in the ass when it comes to disk usage. I'd get an SSD. Sure, they're lower capacity, but they're much faster and more durable than a mechanical drive.

[RavenTheGoddess]

After doing some experimenting, I found that nothing I did would fix the disk usage problem or the startup speed problem. I know it's not my hardware that's the issue because before the creators update, Windows 10 ran smooth like butter. But post-creators update completely ruined it in my opinion. I downgraded to Windows 8.1 and not only am I getting significantly better framerate, disk usage and cpu usage, the startup time went from 6-7 minutes to 20 seconds. This gave me a chance to go through files I didn't need anyway, and I only had maybe 15gb worth of stuff I needed aside from my games. Getting everything moved over and reinstalling my games, I still have 305GB out of 464GB. Not sure why the drive itself says 500 if it's only 464, but eh, close enough.