Concerns about my HDD

[Evan20x]

Hello

My concerns today are about my hard drive that I purchased from Newegg back in December. The problem I describe might have something to do with the hard drive because it just feels like this is a hard drive problem.

I play a game called Guild Wars and just randomly my FPS will drop to 1 sometimes other times it will just hang around 10 FPS. Now when it drops to these low FPS I look at my HDD activity LED light on the front panel of my computer and it just solid and that's why I believe it might be a HDD problem.

System specs:
CPU: Pentium D 820 Smithfield 2.80 GHz
Memory: 1GB (2 x 512MB) DDR2 533MHz
HD: Hitachi HDS721050CLA 500GB 7200 RPM
GPU: ATI Radeon X300 SE

I downloaded HD Tune and benchmarked it so you guys can see the results and tell me if they are normal or there is any sign of deterioration. Maybe?

 

[hang-the-9]

Before you look at the drive, upgrade your RAM to at least 2 gig and get a better video card. The reason your drive is going nuts is because you have too little RAM and a slow video card so it's doing a ton of work with the swap file and loading game data.

Plus when was the last time you re-installed Windows? May want to do that.

 

[Evan20x]

Well I bought the HDD back in December like I said. I formatted it and installed Windows XP on it.

So your saying by upgrading the RAM and the GPU will put less stress on the hard drive?

Also I found the root of cause of the problem I have been having with the FPS dips to 1 and around 10 fps. There is an event going on in the game and there is like 200+ people all packed into one little area and whenever I go near this is when the FPS drop occurs. I guess cause it has to suddenly load those players all at once and I also do know my cpu, gpu and ram are seriously out-dated.

The HD Tune Benchmark chart still worries me though. Here is a pic of another benchmark.

The MB/sec degrade so much over time. And there is still an occasional drop every so many seconds.

EDIT: I have been looking at some charts and it just feels like my hard drive is just a 5400 rpm eco drive or something with a 19ms access time.

 

[kajabla]

I'd agree that the RAM is the problem. It probably takes more memory to handle all those player models, and when you max out your 1gb the HDD has to take up the slack. It's far, far slower than the RAM, so that's probably your problem.

 

[hang-the-9]

Almost 20ms access time is a bit slow. Could be a bad drive, check if there is a firmware update for it.

RAM and video card upgrade is needed anyway if you want to run games well though. Even a min spec gaming card will be lots faster.