help!! my work PC is crawling.

Disk 0 (C:) Active time 100%
Not responding
Task Manager shows the external SSD at 100% with almost no data moving. It started after a storage driver update from ASUS. I've disabled search indexing and some startup apps, but no change. How can I tell whether it's teh driver, Windows, or the drive itself? I've also run a quick malware scan, which came back clean. Rebooting helps for a few minutes, then it's back to 100%.
15 tabs open and chrome ate all 32GB of ram again