Reason To Believe my HardDrive is causing Stuttering

MxOAgentJohnson

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Jun 22, 2014
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Hey guys, not often i post here but i'm asking for advice.

For the longest time, ever since a year or two back, i've noticed, the bigger games got, the harder my hard drive was suffering.

I run a 680, i7 2600 @ 3.4ghz, with 8gb of RAM, and i achive high fps in any game with high to max settings.

However, lately i've found problematic games, this is where my week long trouble shooting has come into play.

I've reinstalled windows, games, new graphics cards, new cpu cooler and thermal paste (which, really friggin helped my temps but didnt solve the problem) practically every fix outside of Hard Drive tests to fix this stuttering problem.

It's the kind of stutter that happens when you turn in a game too quickly, or into a new area of a game, some games dont have this problem very often, some have it bad (I find its worse in MMO's than anything else)

Problematic games, specifically Far Cry 3, Skyrim, Most Unreal Engine 3 games and MMO's

However, for the same amount of problematic games, ihave games that run fine.

Battlefield 3, Deus Ex, Any Source game, Resident Evil, Sleeping Dogs, Crysis 3, Space Marine, Hitman, Fear 3, LA Noire (although the stutter issue on that is unrelated) Spec Ops, Binary Domain, i can go on.

But do you notice a pattern here? Unreal games suffer, Open world games (Which arguably, are bad ports)

I put it down to my hard drive for a few reasons,

Enclosure Type Internal
Interface Serial ATA III
Rotational Speed 7,200 RPM
Average Read Seek Time 9ms
Cache 32MB

This is my current 1tb harddrive, i ordered 4-5 years ago for 40 pound, it runs most games fine up until newer games, i believe that the fps stutter is caused by my old hard drive.

I am in consideration of getting an SSD,

To explain further on the kinda fps drop we are talking about.
It's when you get a solid 60fps, all the time, everywhere, but suddenly for 0.4-5 ms the fps drops and raises back up, causing that pause in turning/loading new areas.

I was thinking of using this old HDrive for non problematic games (mainly indie games, older games) and buying an SSD to install windows and newer more high quality games onto with so they load faster, run faster, and no more of this stutter!

I've done everything, if anyone can think of it being something else please tell but afaik its just this, cpu is fine, gaphics card is fine, ram is fine, mobo is fine, all of those are fine, th eonly problem i can see it being is the hard drive failing to load as fast
 

popatim

Titan
Moderator
probably time for a new drive or an intelligent defrag.
Keep in mind that the outer part of the platter is the fastest and the inner tracks are the slowest. Data gets written from the outside in so it makes sense that newer games are being written to a slower part of the drive than the old, already installed games were.

SSD will only affect loading times so doesnt effect gaming much though it is kind of funny watching stuff appear on screen as your running around because online games still need the server to tell your pc where things are.
 

MxOAgentJohnson

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Jun 22, 2014
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Thank you for your hasty reply Popatim, muchly appreciated.

I'm doing a clean wipe of the hard drive as soon as my SSD comes, my friend shipped me one from his store at a discount (Which is always epic, 70£ for a brand new 110£ samsung 250 840 SSD)

My Hard Drive is pretty full aswell, and the problem only persists in open world games that need rendering on the fly, cpu temps, gpu temps, cpu usage and gpu usage all are stable and memory is being accessed accordingly, so the HDD is the only thing i feel can be causing it, or maybe 3 years of no reinstalling windows and such.