I have an old platter HDD on my gaming rig. Do they slow down as they age? I played Witcher 3 on my rig just fine. However, I've been recently playing Rise of the Tomb Raider. It runs horrible on my PC. Does Rise simply hit the HDD more often or is my HDD slowing down? On both games, I ran with super high settings. I figured Witcher would be the more demanding game.
Do HDD slow down as they age?
- Thread starter ttran7701
- Start date
3. possible problems:
HDD will slow down with DAMAGE. If its dying you will see downward slope from ~80 MB/s to ~5MB/s where it becomes unusable.
If you fill HDD to the brim, it will get WAY SLOWER. Leave 20% free for best experiance.
FRAGMENTATION: its possible that newly downloaded game is FRAGMENTED which means game needs more IOPS for same work. AND HDD is ~300 IOPS always.
Rise of the Tomb Raider loves ram, if it is low on ram, it will have to RELOAD stuff from disc. do you have 16 GB ram ?
HDD will slow down with DAMAGE. If its dying you will see downward slope from ~80 MB/s to ~5MB/s where it becomes unusable.
If you fill HDD to the brim, it will get WAY SLOWER. Leave 20% free for best experiance.
FRAGMENTATION: its possible that newly downloaded game is FRAGMENTED which means game needs more IOPS for same work. AND HDD is ~300 IOPS always.
Rise of the Tomb Raider loves ram, if it is low on ram, it will have to RELOAD stuff from disc. do you have 16 GB ram ?
justin.m.beauvais
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- Dec 15, 2017
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HDD do slow down, a little. Mostly it is wear and tear on the hardware and sectors going bad. Even though it can continue to run with these problems, and does so in most cases at nearly full speed, they can slow a little. Most HDD slowdown happens when your drive gets close to full. I always like to keep 1/4 to 1/3 of my drive free so that it maintains optimal speed. If your drive is slowing a lot, then you have a big problem and you need to backup your data FAST.
Would you mind listing the rest of your PC's parts? I'm betting that there is something else at play here. If you have too little RAM, games that like to use a lot of it will write data that doesn't fit in the RAM to the HDD in a reserved file called a page file, think of it as RAM overflow. If it needs to access that, it gets sloooooow as the HDD speeds are glacial compared to RAM. That is why in systems with only 8 GB or so of RAM I recommend having an SSD for the OS and page file. The access speeds are much faster and if it has to use the page file it can access it with much greater speed, reducing slowdowns.
Would you mind listing the rest of your PC's parts? I'm betting that there is something else at play here. If you have too little RAM, games that like to use a lot of it will write data that doesn't fit in the RAM to the HDD in a reserved file called a page file, think of it as RAM overflow. If it needs to access that, it gets sloooooow as the HDD speeds are glacial compared to RAM. That is why in systems with only 8 GB or so of RAM I recommend having an SSD for the OS and page file. The access speeds are much faster and if it has to use the page file it can access it with much greater speed, reducing slowdowns.
I have 8 gigs of RAM, gtx 980, 2.8GHz Quad Core Intel. My HDD is only half filled and I recently did a defrag. I suspect you are correct about the RAM. Rise may simply love RAM more than Witcher. BTW, I realize my rig is ancient. The only gaming worthy part in my rig is the GTX 980. I'm hoping Intel will release a Spectre-free CPU soon so I can build a whole new rig.
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