Can Hard Drives affect gaming performance?

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ThatGuySmyth

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Jan 10, 2013
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My hard drive is god awful, and it seems to be affecting my in-game performance. My other specs are medium-high end and should be able to cope with games pretty easily, however it just seems to be dropping frames now and then.

Very frustrating, also what is a high spec hard drive I could buy? For under £100 too.
 
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No they cannot as they only affect boot times. A good drive wood be a Cruial or Samsung SSD. Those are blazing fast. If you could please list your specs, it would really help.
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so it can affect frames, and stuttering and frame drops.

Also when recording footage I can only assume that a poor hard drive will cause it to drop cause it's trying to load the files onto the hard drive. Is that true yo

Is 7200rpm the highest speed of HDD?
 
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No they cannot as they only affect boot times. A good drive wood be a Cruial or Samsung SSD. Those are blazing fast. If you could please list your specs, it would really help.
 
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Solution


My specs:

i7 2700k 3.7GHz
2GB 7870 XFX
8GB Corsair
600W Corsair PSU

I have no idea of what the exact model of the hard drive is I just know its fucking bad.
 
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Have you updated all of your drivers regularly? The hard drive should probably be replaced with a WD Black edition and a good cheap samsung or crucial SSD. Put your games and OS on the SSD and everything else on the HDD.
 
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cant really afford them atm unfortunately, just want a HDD that does its job! :-(
 
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hdd speeds do indeed affect boot times, but they also affect game loading times, including loading maps, terrain loading etc...its not that noticeable but try running BF4 64- player multiplayer on a 5200rpm and then compare it to a 10,000 rpm drive...with that said, this is one of the fastest drives, you could store your games on this while everything else that you don't use a lot on the hard drive you already have http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/part/western-digital-internal-hard-drive-wd5000hhtz ...if you don't want to do that, this will store all your stuff while giving you decent speed http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/part/western-digital-internal-hard-drive-wd2003fzex ...then again, as previously mentioned you really shouldn't experience any fps drops using a slow drive, how slow exactly is your drive?

EDIT: in my opinion SSD's are not really worth it for the price: performance they offer, I'd rather wait 10 extra seconds then pay £50 for 120gb of storage (lets not start a massive argument on it please, it's just my opinion)...hybrid's are a better option than both ssds and hdds...example WD caviar black2 hybrid http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/part/western-digital-internal-hard-drive-wd1001x06xdtl however this is obviously above the OP's budget
 
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Well, I've just looked on my hard drive and found it is 7200RPM. I thought all my other specs were absolutely fine and this had to be causing it but actually it has decent specifications. What else could be causing the frame drops! :-(
 
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my performance without fps is 60 fps on majority of games without dropping below. Sometimes down to 40+. The settings are on ultra or high, and occaisonally the frames will drop but it will be a fast drop, it will drop to around 2-3 frames for about a second. Sometimes this will occur every 30 seconds. Sometimes every 10 seconds. Sometimes I dont even get it.

Thanks for the help so far btw man really appreciate it.
 
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I have a 2 WD Caviar Blacks. Pretty awesome drives, but if you dont have that much money I would rather go with cheap SSD I guess.
Cause that HDDs are pretty expensive as well.

Aaaand surely storage has an impact on your game, who likes to stare on loading screens?
 
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lol yeah i do partly agree with you realbenny....and ThatGuySmyth....it doesnt seem like its a hardware problem to me, seems to be some sort of a driver issue i would say...have you updated ALL of the drivers on your system?, here's a software that would help you identify what drivers are outdated www.reviversoft.com/driver-reviver unfortunately you have to pay for it to update the drivers for you, but once we know what, if any, drivers are out of date then we can update them manually from the manufacturer's website...also try turning down maybe something like AA settings, see if that makes a difference, also give V-sync (or adaptive v-sync) a try...that might help as well...also monitor your hardware temps while on idle and load, what power supply model do you have as well?....you mention 8gb of ram, i'm hoping thats not in single channel...also, your card has 2gb of vram, do you have fps drops while something massive is loading up on screen?, the card maybe running out of vram (although 2gb is not particularly easy to saturate), your system activity while playing games will also be helpful ..

this might be alot of stuff to go through but you know, thats what trouble shooting is :)
 
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THE CARD RUNS OUT OF VRAM SOMETIMES YEH! On minecraft it sometimes will crash when it "Runs out of memory".

Thanks for helping me man! You guys are damn good with computers! It might be easier if we talk on skype chat: ben.smyth8, if you prefer. It's OK if you don't.
 
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haha thanks, anyone can become good with computers, its a steep learning curve but its totally do-able, and this is coming from a guy who 2 years ago didnt know anything beyond word processors, and your problem was the card running out of vram then? you could try to lower textures and AA settings, best way to minimize vram usage without sacrificing much eye-candy.
 
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yeh but maybe it just isnt accessing the VRAM. There shouldnt really be an issue with it completely runnig out of 2GB's worth of ram surely?
 
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well modern games eat up alot of vram on high-ultra settings, the vram is basically the place where information is temporarily stored to be then processed by the gpu, when that 2gb of vram is filled up but there is more information that quickly needs to be processed, the gpu needs to process some of the information in the 2gb vram first to allow more information to come through (which slows things down), the vram space simply isnt big enough to provide the gpu with the amount of information it needs to process...Think of the gpu as a doorway and the gpu being a room, regardless of the doorway's width if the room can only fit 30 people in then to fit in more you need to empty out some of those 30 people first

EDIT: and yeah btw, when the gpu runs out of vram when something massive is loading up, you get very rapid fps drops, monitor your graphics card usage to see if the card runs out of vram when playing games
 
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I doubt that minecraft takes up your VRAM. 2 GB is enough for modern games like BF4. It might be that not all of your RAM is being utilized.
 
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yea minecraft probably takes up the OP's system ram, not vram unless he has some crazy shaders mod running....but according to EA Battlefield 4 requires more than 2gb, 3gb optimally to run at the highest settings, as suggested earlier, the OP should try to reduce AA settings if the vram is being used up because AA loves gobbling up vram...have a look at this



this is at 1080p as well, but monitoring the gpu activity/ vram usage through afterburner will really tell if the vram is being used up or not
 
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Yeah that's what I thought so. And a hard drive cannot directly affect a game, only the loading times! When a game is loading, it is accessing all the files on that map, guns, etc, it doesn't do that while gaming.
 
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