Hard drive usage jumping to 100% when gaming

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Gussy123

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May 30, 2014
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For about a couple of months now I have been getting random fps drops (to around 1-20fps) on almost all games even when I am getting a very high constant frame rate otherwise.

The frame drops normally occur in cpu intensive games such as Arma 3, Arma 2 and dayZ, but I also sometimes notice fps drops in other games (like CSGO). I now found that whenever my frames drop it is when my hard drive spikes to 100%.

I've tried many things to fix this such as; disabling windows services (superfetch, Background intelligent transfer service, and windows search), disabling all startup applications, changing virtual memory paging (Screenshot of what i mean: http://prntscr.com/azid4z), disabling all non-windows services and running a malware test and removing malware.

I also ran a 3rd party program test on my HD and found this: http://prntscr.com/azielm (The left one is the programs demo and the right is my hard drive)

Screenshot of my disk usage in an Arma 3 session: http://prntscr.com/azifmr

My specs are:
I7 4790k
Gtx 970
Asus ranger VII mobo
2Tb seagate HDD

If anyone could help I would be so happy as this is really bothering me!
Thanks :)
 
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Gussy123

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May 30, 2014
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Okay thanks for quick reply, do you think i should defrag my hard drive then?
 
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rgd1101

rgd1101

Don't
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Nov 7, 2011
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Depend, if it is failing or badly fragmented.
1st backup your important data, then defrag.
 
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Gussy123

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May 30, 2014
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Okay, how do i tell if my hard drive is failing though?
 
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ikaz

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Dec 27, 2005
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you can run a chkdsk from command prompt, open a command prompt (you can type CMD from run command) the try chdhsk /f , you will get a message about the C drive in use and it will say it will run it at boot time. So you just do a restart and it should auto run and just wait see if that helps.
 
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Gussy123

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May 30, 2014
38
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Okay, I ran the disk check and repair thing and it didn't help, guessing i should just try de-fragging then
 
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ToxykVib3

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Feb 15, 2015
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If you had another HD with the same game installed and use it you could defenitly find out if its a problem generated by your HD or not
 
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Solandri

Solandri

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Jan 4, 2012
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The yellow dots are access times. How long it takes the disk to move the read/write heads to a random sector. HD Tune tests starting from the outside tracks of the HDD and gradually moves inside (that's why the speeds slow down as you go further to the right - less data passes under the read/write head per rotation in the inner tracks).

Normally you'll only see a 2:1 ratio between maximum and minimum speeds (ratio of circumference of outer track vs inner track). Unless you were using your computer or it was doing other stuff while you were running HD Tune, those dips in the blue line suggest there's a problem with the drive. Probably it was having trouble reading data so had to re-try a few times before it got a clean read. On an idle drive, you'd expect the blue line to only have small bumps, like in the demo screenshot in your first post. The minimum speed on the right, the maximum speed on the left, at a 2:1 ratio. When a drive is having problems (or is doing other stuff while HD Tune is running), the blue line will dip in places in the middle, and the minimum measured speed happens in those dips.

I'm not sure what the yellow dots disappearing means. It looks like the program gave up trying to record access times, or they are off the scale (took more than 50 ms) so the program didn't record them, which would again suggest the drive is dying.

I'm sorry that's not the news you wanted to hear. Have you run SeaTools and checked the S.M.A.R.T. data on the drive? You could be sitting on a ticking time bomb. The drive could completely fail at any moment, and all this testing you're doing is just bringing that moment closer. Backup your data ASAP if you haven't already. Then worry about figuring out what is going on.

http://www.seagate.com/support/downloads/seatools/
 
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