After I resized the E drive, My games became too slow.

[Karim Spanix]

Hi,
I have 2 TB Hard disk and three partitions ( C - D - E )
The E drive was full so I wanted to add more space to it .. so I took from D 100 GB and added them to E. It worked fine.
But there is a little problem .. the E drive only became too slow. and when I run game there are too much frame drops happen and they are not playable at all .. even movies I can't watch them.
I don't know what to do all my games were working like charm until I resized
Please, Help.
PS: My hard disk type is WD Black 2TB
Sorry for my English.

 

[tsnor]

Hi. Your English is good.

Games rarely use disk drives once the data is loaded. If you have a disk drive indicator light (a light that turns on when the disk is in use) then you can see if the disk drive is being used when the game gets slow.

Slow disk drive would cause: Slow game loading times. Slow level load times. A pause while everyone else starts in a multi-player game but you are still waiting.

Slow drives do not cause: Lower frame rates while playing. Slower, laggy game play once playing.

Lack of memory can cause you to use the disk at unexpected times. If you have less than 3GB of memory (DRAMs, DIMMs, system memory) then let us know.

There are many disk drive performance tools available. Google one (example HDTUNE) and see if your disk drive is wildly off in performance or just about right. Most spinning disk drives will hit 50MB/sec or more throughput in hdtune with default tdtuen block size, with latency in the 30 mils or less. Most SSD will hit 100 MB/sec or more throughput with latency in the less than 5 mils range.

 

[Karim Spanix]

Hi. Your English is good.

Games rarely use disk drives once the data is loaded. If you have a disk drive indicator light (a light that turns on when the disk is in use) then you can see if the disk drive is being used when the game gets slow.

Slow disk drive would cause: Slow game loading times. Slow level load times. A pause while everyone else starts in a multi-player game but you are still waiting.

Slow drives do not cause: Lower frame rates while playing. Slower, laggy game play once playing.

Lack of memory can cause you to use the disk at unexpected times. If you have less than 3GB of memory (DRAMs, DIMMs, system memory) then let us know.

There are many disk drive performance tools available. Google one (example HDTUNE) and see if your disk drive is wildly off in performance or just about right. Most spinning disk drives will hit 50MB/sec or more throughput in hdtune with default tdtuen block size, with latency in the 30 mils or less. Most SSD will hit 100 MB/sec or more throughput with latency in the less than 5 mils range.

Hi tsnor,
Thank you for you reply, the problem here that all was good before I've done this resize.
I have 8 GB memory and my GPU is (GTX 970).. so I'm sure that the hard disk is the problem.
Also I checked the hard disk with many tools and it passed all tests and nothing wrong with it.
which drives me crazy, I copied a game or two on the other drive (D)
and tested them, they worked great as they used to work.
But on the (E) drive they are unplayable as I said and not on the loading sceen only, No, but also in the main gameplay it's so laggy and unstable. For example, I always played Far Cry Primal on closed 60 fps, now it took so much time to open from steam and I play it on 20 fps. so I can't really detect the issue and I don't know what to do.
Thank you for your interest.

 

[tsnor]

Go into setup on Far Cry Primal after you move it to the E drive and reset it to defaults. Then retune it to the video settings. etc., that you like. Sometimes games remember what drive they are on and store profiles, etc and a simple copy is not sufficient -- you lose the profile. Google to make sure that there is nothing you need to do for the game you are running to get it to use the E disk vs C or D. Make sure you are running with the video setting you think you are using.

The C, D, E drives are all on the same physical drive, so they should give you the same performance unless there are physical errors on the drive. Let's rule this out using windows built in sector scan tool to check for (and reconfigure around) bad sectors.

To check for bad sectors follow this post from Microsoft and make sure you select the Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors check box. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/2641432/check-your-hard-disk-for-errors-in-windows-7 This will take hours so do overnight.

Then force a defrag of your E: using the same properties dialog that you used to scan for errors.

After you have done above, if games are still slow, then do the following:
1. Open windows resource monitor. many ways to do this, here are two: type resmon.exe into the Start Menu search box and press Enter. Or, open the Start Menu and go to "All Programs -> Accessories -> System Tools -> Resource Monitor".
2. Goto the disk tab in resource monitor
3. Goto the disk activity section, note that it shows you the files being accessed then look to the far right and find the "response time" column for each file.
4. Leaving resource monitor running, start your game.
5. When the game lags, use the windows key to get to desktop where you can see Resrouce Monitor. Note the disk activity rate and the response time for the files associated with your game (they will be in the game directory). If the Disk activity is low and the response times are not in the 100s then disk is not slowing your game.
6. You can explore other tabs in Resource monitor to see if CPU spiked to 100% or if network got bad, etc.

Finally, try a bunch of games on E, see if they are all bad or only one. It is very rare that speed of disk drive makes a gaming performance difference, much less that moving a game from one partition to another on the same drive changes anything. Games are video, CPU and network sensitive. The disk is not used at all during gameplay, so really CANNOT directly drop the frame rate from 60 to 20 (I believe the framerate is dropping, but it will be an indirect reason, not because the disk is slow).

OH: final thought: windows does some neat preloading of memory if you have enough memory. It is called superfetch. It learns what games you play and preloads them so they start fast. When you switched drive letters it'll take superfetch a few days to learn your new file access pattern. That shouldn't make enough of a difference to drop framerates, but will slow load times.