100% disk usage on SSD

Lately i have encountered issues with disk usage spiking at 100% for about 15 min or so when trying to game or open up any intensive task, causing the PC to be unbearable and pretty much useless until i was able to restart it. Read a bunch of threads here on reddit with some saying thats normal even with powerful gaming pc’s or laptops, and some giving advice to change power plan settings, adjust game settings or it might be background apps such ass windows update or anti-virus doing real time scans. I tried everything i can based off of what i read online and reddit, none worked. I couldn’t give in that a powerful gaming PC that i personally have should be behaving this way. But after so much research, the simple issue was messing with the controller settings in device manager. If you access that setting and see that your controllers are under Intel RST/VMD Controller for your NVMe drive, you need to switch it so it runs off of your native Microsoft NVMe driver. The RST is a new hardware/firmware on 11th gen plus intel systems, that overrides the standard NVMe express controller. The RST controller is apparently very prone to causing I/O deadlocks under high random read write loads, which is causing the disk usage to spike to 100 for sometime until it settles down. Ever since i changed it to Microsofts standard NVMe controller, my PC disk usage is back to normal. Even with anti virus running, windows updating, Steam and games running, my disk does not spike anymore. To do this(at your own risk) step

1. Win+R->msconfig->Boot tab->Check Safe Boot Minimal->Apply OK and hit “Exit without restart”

2)Now manually restart the PC, go F2 into BIOS/go to Advanced->VMD->disable that setting, save and exit. Now windows will load in safe mode, it will switch the drivers safely on its own to the native Microsoft Controller. Now go back to step 1 and uncheck the Safe Boot option, hit OK then restart normally. Now when the pc loads back up, go back to device Manager/Storage Controllers and what you should notice is now the RST Controllers have been erased and replaced with Standard NVM Express Controller.

This worked like a charm with no issues for me. Sorry for the long write up, but i noticed many ppl facing this issue, and hopefully this is a universal fix that can help others with this issue.

For perspective, i have a Asus TUF F15 12th gen Intel i7-12700h/RTX 4070 that this was happening to.

Cheers 🤙