Question Delay of a few seconds seemingly every time I load or save files ?

[Horrux]

So a year or so ago I got sick and tired of always being the last guy entering a game, even though I had a SATA SSD for my games.

So I upgraded to a shiny 2Tb M.2. But the delay persisted.

Then I got a new motherboard and made a whole new install of Windows 10, and the delay persisted.

Then I got a new CPU and RAM, and still I have a few seconds' delay seemingly every. single. time. that one of my applications or games need to load or save.

It's getting on my serves. What can cause this? My system is no slouch, I'm running:

Ryzen 9 5950X
32 Gb DDR4 G. Skill 3600mhz CL16 RAM
MSI MPG X570 Gaming Carbon Pro WiFi motherboard
And an old ASUS GTX 1060 6gb, because well you know why.

Any ideas?

EDIT: List of disks connected to this PC

Crucial CT240M500 SATA SSD
ST4000VX007 Seagate 4tb mech HD
ST4000DX001 Seagate 4tb SSHD (Hybrid drive)
WDC WD1001 FALS Western Digital 1tb mech HD
WD_Black SN750 2tb m.2 2280 SSD

 

[Ralston18]

PSU: make, model, wattage, age, condition? History of heavy gaming use - correct?

Disk drives: How full?

= = = =

Try to determine what your build is doing or trying to do during those seconds of delay.

Before entering a game open either Resource Monitor or Task Manager. Use both tools but only one at at time.

First observe the system for awhile - at least until it reaches some steady state where things are not changing. (Note the small arrows in column headers - the arrows allow you to sort the data being shown in ascending or descending order.)

Leave the window open and then enter the game as you normally do.

Hopefully you will be able to see some change in resource usage that corresponds with the delays.

Key is to identify what resource is being used, to what extent (%), and what is using any given resource.

Process Explorer (Microsoft, free) may also prove helpful.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/process-explorer

May take a few tries along with some trial and error to identify a possible culprit.

 

[geofelt]

What drive holds the windows C drive?
If any needed file or directory link is on a HDD, it will take 40x longer to access it compared to a ssd.

 

[Horrux]

Thank you!!!

I did what you suggest and it instantly became obvious that it was my "Documents" drive, the E:/ which is the older 1tb Western Digital mechanical drive which is blocking reads and writes, stopping I/O for up to about 20 seconds.

This HDD was, a long time ago, divided into a 250gb boot partition and a 750gb data partition. Later when I got an SSD, I er... "Fused" the first partition into the second one. I think that is called a "dynamic disk" for some reason? So anyway, I'm thinking this might be the cause of these delays, so I backed up the data, erased the partition(s), created a new one, formatted, and right now I'm restoring the data.

We'll see if that fixes it. Otherwise the HDD is just too old, even though crystaldiskinfo reports it's healthy. It's only 1tb, I could get rid of it. I'll come back and let you know how it goes! Thanks!

 

[Horrux]

PSU: make, model, wattage, age, condition? History of heavy gaming use - correct?

Disk drives: How full?

= = = =

Try to determine what your build is doing or trying to do during those seconds of delay.

Before entering a game open either Resource Monitor or Task Manager. Use both tools but only one at at time.

First observe the system for awhile - at least until it reaches some steady state where things are not changing. (Note the small arrows in column headers - the arrows allow you to sort the data being shown in ascending or descending order.)

Leave the window open and then enter the game as you normally do.

Hopefully you will be able to see some change in resource usage that corresponds with the delays.

Key is to identify what resource is being used, to what extent (%), and what is using any given resource.

Process Explorer (Microsoft, free) may also prove helpful.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/process-explorer

May take a few tries along with some trial and error to identify a possible culprit.

Yep, you were right. I found right away that the dynamic volume of drive E: was the culprit. After deleting all partitions and restoring the data, everything seems to work well enough. It's not blazing fast, but saved games are usually very manageable in size.

Thank you!!