tastylime :
Rdslw :
It's possible. HDD lags is mostly FREEZE with no FPS drops. Try making ramdisc for 300 MB and use ReadyBoost on it. It it helps then you have to get at least second HDD and split workload.
from what you told us you have 512 GB drive. Try looking at HDD model and googling it. Anything with less than 32 MB of cache is performance killers.
in general you want to have 20% of any drive free. Works on any type of drive, anything between 0-80 % is the same.
Not sure how but it turns out to be 1TB with 32mb cache, and its from 2006.
so it should be decent. I think you should try lowering textures. You need to load them into GPU Vram and if you lack Vram games uses system ram, if system ram is not enough, its dropped and reloaded from HDD. Some games wait for textures to load (will shutter or freeze) or just objects appear later
if you see something like this:
https://youtu.be/-MOUX65Myk0?t=136
then its definitely to slow HDD for your system
I would really recommend experiment with windows ready boost
https://www.howtogeek.com/123780/htg-explains-is-readyboost-worth-using/
on fast pendrive or in ramdisc ( no more than ~300 MB).
Check ram usage while gaming,
http://azius.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/xtaskmanager_commit.png.pagespeed.ic.D-pPoodqJX.png
you want that to be under 9 GB with 8 GB of ram or it will slow down and shutter like crazy on HDD.
Might be worth checking if you did not overload PSU. You should have ~500W