Western Digital Good R/W Speeds But Is Dead Slow At Videogames?

exomonkeyman · Aug 13, 2017

Hello Guys!

I Recently reset my PC and have been sorting and cleaning through all my Hard Drives and reselecting ones for different uses etc etc

And so I assigned video games and applications to my Western Digital 3TB 5400Rpm Drive.
It's original purpose was for storing video footage/dailies before I reset my PC that was.
With 7600 hours on record it gets a good writes around 160Mb/s and reads at 190Mb/s.

But is pure dead slow at playing video games such as Doom and Prey.
When Loading Doom & Prey sounds won't load, textures stay unloaded mush forever and when compared to my SSD & and more notable my (Dying) external Western Digital 2TB drive it's failing to keep up.

I have no idea why a drive like this is so slow at video games such a shame because it's a 3TB I don't wanna ding dong ditch it.

DiskMark Score
http://i.imgur.com/anxuPlC.png

Crystal Disk Info
http://i.imgur.com/RkDyTC1.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/sGHzUCu.png

Edit: Just to elaborate I just ran Prey on my 3TB 5400 Rpm drive and noticed some audio stopped loading, I just ran it on my SSD and I heard a lot of sounds that was missing when playing compared to my HDD.

My only guess is to try swapping over Sata ports (As they have been swapped recently when I reset my PC)

TLDR: This drive of mine is not that fast but I wouldn't consider it slow enough to have an impact on gameplay with problems related to Sound and Graphical glitches but maybe it's just that garbage slow?

Cheers for any help guys/girls!
-Samuel

SkyNetRising · Aug 13, 2017

exomonkeyman :

I'd say - your game is probably corrupted.

Phillip Corcoran · Aug 13, 2017

Your CrystalDisk Info screenshot was a bit pointless - it only shows about half of the SMART information - :/

exomonkeyman · Aug 13, 2017

I'd say - your game is probably corrupted.

Sorry I typed that a little wrong, I meant that when running on the SSD it played all the sounds my HDD couldn't play/keep up with.

Your CrystalDisk Info screenshot was a bit pointless - it only shows about half of the SMART information

http://i.imgur.com/sGHzUCu.png

Sorry I did this post in a bit of a rush, hope this helps.

molletts · Aug 13, 2017

It is only a 5400rpm drive so it's never going to be terribly quick. Looking up the part number tells me that it's a WD Green, so it's optimised for lowest power usage over performance. These drives aren't really intended for running games off; they're more for storing bulk data like audio and video files which tend to be read in "streaming" mode (which is essentially what you have tested by measuring the sequential read and write performance).

Game (or application or OS) loading requires good random access performance. SSDs are king here; with hard drives the general rule of thumb is that higher rpm tends to go with better random access performance. (It's not the only factor but it's a major one and it doesn't make much sense to design a high-rpm drive with low seek performance.)

Try testing some different drives for random access performance (I think CrystalDiskInfo can do this) and see what comes out fastest. That will probably be your best bet for game performance. The SSD should get crazy figures; hard drives will be much slower. The WD Green will probably come in around 1MB/s. A 10,000rpm WD VelociRaptor might reach 3MB/s if you're lucky.

Stephen

exomonkeyman · Aug 13, 2017

molletts :

It is only a 5400rpm drive so it's never going to be terribly quick. Looking up the part number tells me that it's a WD Green, so it's optimised for lowest power usage over performance. These drives aren't really intended for running games off; they're more for storing bulk data like audio and video files which tend to be read in "streaming" mode (which is essentially what you have tested by measuring the sequential read and write performance).

Game (or application or OS) loading requires good random access performance. SSDs are king here; with hard drives the general rule of thumb is that higher rpm tends to go with better random access performance. (It's not the only factor but it's a major one and it doesn't make much sense to design a high-rpm drive with low seek performance.)

Try testing some different drives for random access performance (I think CrystalDiskInfo can do this) and see what comes out fastest. That will probably be your best bet for game performance. The SSD should get crazy figures; hard drives will be much slower. The WD Green will probably come in around 1MB/s. A 10,000rpm WD VelociRaptor might reach 3MB/s if you're lucky.

Stephen

Sounds like a solution to me, 5400Rpm just isn't quite cut out for gaming.

Thanks for your help everyone look at swapping drives over and keeping this 3TB for storing.

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Western Digital Good R/W Speeds But Is Dead Slow At Videogames?

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exomonkeyman

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