Yup, I just use task manager to check it out. It is indeed Python making use of the ssd, but it looks like things are actually working as expected and it was just a data throughput issue highlighted by architecture changes in the model which had led to a speedup. I increased the depth of the architecture and now its hovering between 20% to 100% at times, but consistently at 92% utilization for cuda.
thanks for the help!