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March 13th, 2025 16:19

Dell Inspiron 3501 100% Disk Usage

I have a problem where the last month or so my Inspiron 3501 keeps going to 100% disk use.  I rank the processes in task manager by disk usage, and the highest two (often "System") are around 15 MB/s and 5 MB/s.  This doesn't seem right.  Should I have an overhead of 500 MB/s at least?

(1) How do I see whether I have an M.2 drive or a SATA SSD on this machine?

(2) Possible the SATA cable has gone bad, if SATA?

(3) I believe this product can be upgraded to an M.2 if it has SATA, is this correct?  How do I find out the max speed of the M.2 drive, if true?

Thank you!

10 Elder

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28.7K Posts

March 13th, 2025 16:52

1.  Go into setup - F2 at powerup.  The drives will be listed there.

2.  Unlikely.  If it's a hard drive, that's part of the issue - Windows 10 and 11 do not play well with spinning drives.  It's also possible you have a drive that's starting to fail.

3.  The system takes a standard M.2 NVMe SSD -- though it is PCIe 3X4, so a 4X4 drive won't perform to its design potential.

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March 14th, 2025 18:24

Hi - so the laptop has a Kioxia BG4 Series 256GB M.2 NVMe SSD already.  Shouldn't read write be like 1500-2000 MB/s? 

So either the drive has gone bad or something is off.  Thanks!

10 Elder

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28.7K Posts

March 14th, 2025 18:31

How much free space is left on the drive, and are the system temperatures abnormally high?

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March 14th, 2025 21:46

Yeah... that was it.  There is only 4 GB on the drive.  

Ok, I'll sort out the space and probably buy a larger drive.  Thank you so much!

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March 14th, 2025 21:50

Wait, hang on.  My documents are like 10 GB.  I don't have games.  Why is there no space?  I wish windows had a way to see every folder with sizes everywhere like a mac does.

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March 14th, 2025 21:59

Yeah it's all being taken up by Apps and System files.  Windows is 110 GB on its own apparently.  The apps are pretty sparse, a lot of Dell stuff.  I'll just get a bigger drive.

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