Hey all, not sure if this is the best place to post but it does seem at least potentially related to windows (or so I hope). I’ve been working on a project recently and seemingly out of nowhere I’ve hit a bottleneck where after a little training my ssd starts to max out and cuda utilization drops to low percentages as in the pic below (windows 10 pro):

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Worried I pushed this ssd a little too hard and its dying now, but wanted another opinion on why this could be occurring. My external SSDs are still a little slower, however this ssd was capable of consistently utilizing cuda at 90% or so for the entirety of training only a couple days ago. This project is using mixed precision training, although I don’t imagine that would be all that relevant here (perhaps I’m wrong though). any value from 0 to 12 for num_workers has the same result after differing periods of training (although all less than one minute)
The project encountering the bottleneck is going through around 30,500 spectrogram pairs with each pair being 8MB. I tried another one of my projects which uses midi encoded into sequences of tokens where each file is 9kb, this one is able to max out cuda without issue which seems to point to the ssd being the issue. Is this in line with other peoples experiences after training for a while on an ssd? Are there any tips people might have to alleviate this issue? Not exactly a huge problem as I have free slots in my machine and can buy another ssd, but certainly something I’d like to avoid if not necessary.