Gaming performance and HDDs

Chris Beard · 1 Oct 2010 at 09:46

Hi All,

Just a quick open question:

Has anyone ever had trouble running games because their HDD was slow? I've had this issue and it ****ed me off something crazy. You would have thought that if a game wasn't using even half of your RAM it'd never even think about going back to disk for the embarressment of showing how poorly it was managing your memory. However I've found at least 3 games that do this:

STALKER
MASS EFFECT (horribly, unplayably so)
Time Gentleman Please (which could probably be forgiven as it's indie)

Has anyone else experienced this?

Cheers,
Chris.

95thrifles · 1 Oct 2010 at 10:04

You sure its your HDD?
Is your HDD full?
Whats your full system specs mate? Sounds a bit strange unless it is full HDD, if it is then try freeing up some space

Chris Beard · 1 Oct 2010 at 10:22

It was a scorpio blue 500GB with about 200GB free.

The diagnosis was to simply move the game files to a different drive, which improved the problem slightly. Switching to an SSD solved it completely.

Sys specs are:

e8200 @3.2Ghz
hd5770 stock
4GB ddr2 800Mhz RAM stock

raralis · 1 Oct 2010 at 10:53

My guess is either the hdd is dying or you've got some malware slowing down your pc.

95thrifles · 1 Oct 2010 at 10:55

I suppose if it were really badly fragmented it might cause it

Mak3R · 1 Oct 2010 at 12:13

Well if it was a Scorpio blue they are by nature slower HDDs as they only operate at 5400RPM. Perhaps you should get a normal speed HD, i.e. a 7200rpm drive...

Chris Beard · 1 Oct 2010 at 15:14

I've solved this already chaps - I'm using an SSD. I just wanted to see if anyone else had found this.

There is no malware, numerous reinstalls did not solve the problem. The disk is not fragmented and defrags were to no avail. This was just a data disk - no OS on it at all, mostly just Steam games.

Harpss1ngh · 1 Oct 2010 at 18:29

Sounds like its because of the 5400RPM speed and the fact that scorpios are laptop drives which are generally slower as they have more power saving features on by default which hurt random access times.

SSD's on average have like 0.1 random access time whereas hardrives can have on average 12ms. Also check your pagefile. As you have 4GB RAM, perhaps reduce your virtual memory slightly down so that it uses more RAM which is faster than the page/swap file on your hard drive for virtual memory.