HDD causing instable fps?

I have a laptop with SSD + HDD. I tried saving a little space on my SSD by moving the pagefile to the HDD. This led me to discover that:

1) Although I have 16GB of RAM and am nowhere near using all of it, Windows still likes to write stuff to the pagefile.

2) When Windows writes stuff to the pagefile, it seems to take priority over everything else the computer is doing. e.g. If the HDD has spun down to save power, Windows will completely freeze while it waits for the HDD to spin up, so it can write whatever it thinks is so important to the pagefile.

So I was getting occasional microstutters in my gaming until I moved the pagefile back to my SSD. In your case since we're not really sure the HDD is the culprit, I'd try a little experiment. 12 GB is plenty to run CS:GO. Temporarily disable the pagefile - tell Windows you want no pagefile. (This PC or My Computer -> right click -> properties -> Advanced system settings -> Performance -> Settings -> Advanced -> Virtual memory -> Change) Reboot, and see if the microstutter disappears. If they do, then yeah you should consider getting a SSD.

Also working against you is that it's an older drive. The data density on the older drives is not as high (less data is stored on a track going around the disk once). That's why the newer 2-4 TB SATA drives can hit sequential speeds in excess of 150 MB/s, while an older IDE drive like yours may top out at 60 MB/s (the IDE interface limit was 66 MB/s) even though both drives are 7200 RPM. Now, I doubt you're reaching either of these limits simply from recording video (we passed that point back in the 1990s - that's when HDDs became fast enough to record uncompressed video in real-time). But it does mean the computer is spending more time waiting for the HDD, so a small hiccup (like write error) could cause an even bigger delay.


Most FPS meters don't tell you instantaneous FPS. They give a sliding window average. So for example they may count the number of frames which were displayed in the last 1 second, and display that as the FPS.

A drop from 500 to 240 FPS is about a 50% drop. So if it were using a 1 second window, the screen freezing entirely for a half second, before resuming the game at 500 FPS would result in the meter going from 500 FPS to 250 FPS, before gradually climbing back to 500 FPS over 1 second.

So even though it sounds like 240 FPS is more than enough, depend on how the FPS meter works, it may indicate a crippling stutter in the game display. (Instantaneous FPS tends to jump around too much to be really useful. One frame may be spit out at 90 FPS, the next frame at 142 FPS, the next at 118 FPS, etc. And the resulting FPS display is a blur of numbers which is impossible to read. A sliding window will average these out so the display shows a number which gradually changes.)