HDD 100% usage

[ChrisKouf]

About two weeks after I bought this laptop my hard drive sometimes hits 100% usage with tasks like "system", "chrome", "Antimalware Service","Windows problem reporting" usually accountable for using all the resources while at the same time the machine becomes completely unusable. Everything freezes, programs stop responding,I can barely even load and view a photo! I often get  "blue screen" errors, and I have to wait for about 15 minutes for it to stop what it's doing in order to return to somewhat "normality". This has been going on for 1.5 years. I bought this laptop back in October 2018  and I am severly dissatisfied with this product until this issue is resolved. I got it for its specs (i7 8th gen, GTX 1050) but never would I have thought that it would take 10 minutes for it to boot up.

Below I add a screenshot of my HDD (ST1000LM035-1RK172)  benchmark with HD Tune Pro and I am looking for an expert that can enlighten me as to whether this looks normal as well as what can I do to make this better. I should also add that while the benchmark shows somehing like 197MB/s as a maximum reading speed, when Disk usage is at 100% my task manager shows apps that are using less than 5-10MB/s but nevertheless they are highlighted red and according to the task manager they use all the resources. Also even when it seems to behave fine it has these weird spikes even if i'm only running chrome for example (screenshot below). I have tried everything I have seen on forums like, turning off superfetch, windows search, turning off windows defender, reinstalling certain drivers etc  but while these may seem to work for a while, things tend to go downhill again in the end and I am thinking it's the hard drive's fault. I plead for help with this issue as it has made me lose infinite amount of time just waiting for things to respond so I can go on about my business. 

Sincere thanks to anyone who can offer a hand of help

(no program was running during benchmark )

Disk performance with only Google Chrome running:

[WAWood]

@ChrisKouf 

There are a couple of possibilities here.

First is that Chrome and/or your AV product are causing the issues.  Chrome has received a lot of bad press with Win10 to the degree that I quit using it a long time ago.  I switched over to Opera, but recently, have been using the Stable version of the new Edgeium (Chromium-based Edge) and find the second to be a better performer than the first.  So, I would switch browsers and see if that makes any difference.

You could also try disabling the AV product as my guess there is that it is doing real-time monitoring and that is sucking up processing power.

You could also try booting into safe mode just to see what happens then.  If that solves it, then you have the unenviable task of figuring out what startup process and/or driver is causing the issue.  Here are instructions for restarting in safe mode:  https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/12376/windows-10-start-your-pc-in-safe-mode

[ChrisKouf]

I have no Anti Virus running except Windows Defender, I have searched and found that "Antimalware Service" task is Windows Defender, so I don't think that is the issue

[WAWood]

@ChrisKouf 

Actually, YES -- it can be.  While I used Windows Defender for a while, I go so many False Positives and forced Quarantines that I eventually went to great length to disable it and replaced it with MalwareBytes AntiMalware.