Freezing issues on Hybrid Drive since windows 10. How do I find a driver?

[BradOZman]

Been using Windows 10 for a while now and had to fix a lot of weird things with it so far...

So I have had a lot of weir mouse freezes mouse lag etc. Often the whole system grinds to a halt seemingly for no reason...

Tried so many things manages to fix mouse lag but the freezing still happens ... anyway...

I have noticed that when problems happen my HDD usage spikes to 100%.

I'm thinking that maybe the HDD is not correctly recognized and this might be the root cause of my problems.

Its a Toshiba hybrid drive on a laptop 1.5TB with 8gig SSD (I think its 8gig)... I kind of never worried about it since I was told that the drive handles all the cashing etc itself.

I check the device driver and it comes from Microsoft. I'm guessing when I had windows 8 preloaded when I baught the laptop that there must have been some Toshiba specific driver or utility that managed HDD interactions.

Since the upgrade to win10 I have also done a clean install of win10 and after recent updates it appears the HDD usage intermittently spikes to 100% for seemingly no reason (maybe windows doing something in the background) or while I'm playing a game etc.

This causes my mouse input not to register for short intervals causing me to screw up things in work or miss that critical moment in a game.

A good example is I have my HD as a toolbar on my taskbar so that I can brouse the entire HD quickly through menu's. Ive done this ever since windows XP on all my machines.

If there was a problem fetching the info quick enough it would just take a sec for the menu of that sub-folder to appear.. But since I got this laptop and windows 10 it completely freezes the mouse input. It's like mouse input has the lowest priority or something in win 10.

I've tried finding and installing drivers for the HD but haven't found anything on the Toshiba sites for it and the Intel rapid storage ones wont update it. Still uses the Microsoft one.

If I manually choose the intel drivers windows says its not compatible..

Not sure what to do.. Is it a problem with win10 giving too much priority to HDD access? Or is it a driver issue with my HD. If so how can I find the driver?




[Replying... for somereason I cant reply or add comments on answer thequestion ]

If the freezes are for a few seconds, go into Windows' advanced power settings, and increase the "Turn hard disk off after" timer to 20-30 minutes or never. What's probably happening is the HDD is spinning down to save power. When Windows needs something from the HDD, it is freezing everything while it waits for the drive to spin up.

If it freezes for about a second, then same thing is happening except the drive is probably parking its heads. Windows freezes as above while it waits for the heads to unpark. It seems the designers of hybrid drives somehow got it into their head that since oft-used files will be cached by the flash memory, they can spin down the drive or park its heads more aggressively. Unfortunately there's no simple fix for this one.

I wrote a small batch file you can run to test if either of the above two are the cause. Create a file called wakehdd.bat and copy the following into it:

:repeat
@echo %RANDOM% > tmp.txt
ping -n 8 127.0.0.1 > NUL
goto repeat

Now run wakehdd.bat (either in a command prompt or double-click it). Basically it writes a random number to the file tmp.txt every 8 seconds (random to thwart any caching). That prevents the HDD from spinning down or parking its heads. If either of those are the cause, the freezing will not happen while this batch file is running.

If your problem is head parking, the only other solution I've found is to use CrystalDiskInfo and disabling all the power management (APM) settings on the drive (move the slider to the right til it says FEh). That will take care of the problem, probably at the cost of a little shorter battery life. Unfortunately, the drives I've tried it on seem to reset their APM settings every reboot or few reboots, and you have to do it again.
http://crystalmark.info/download/index-e.html

Nope batch file is running and still happens.. Anytime the HD is accessed via my menu toolbar the mouse freezes. I didn't think it was a sleep issue either because IM always saving files or something usually. I have set it not to sleep the HD for 60 minutes in power management now and no difference.

On all my other systems in win 7 previously spinning the HD up never stopped mouse or keyboard input before. Just whatever was accessing the drive would not respond until it spun up. But mouse input always worked fine no matter what my computer was doing.

Is there some way to give mouse input priority over other hardware interactions?

There are a lot of people complaining about those hybrid drives.
Easiest way to resolve this is to replace your HDD with SSD.

For laptop SSD is a must anyway.

SSD's are not big enough lol. My steam folder alone is about 200gig. Also Ive seen a lot of people have SSD's fail on them over the past year.

Seems a bit dumb to spend up to $1000 on a hard drive and have it die after a few months. Not sure if everyone all the same bad batch or something but yeah Im not ready to fork out top dollar while that stuff is happening.

Didnt think they could be that unreliable TBH. I mean no moving parts. What they just burn out or something?

 

[SkyNetRising]

There are a lot of people complaining about those hybrid drives.
Easiest way to resolve this is to replace your HDD with SSD.

For laptop SSD is a must anyway.

 

[Solandri]

If the freezes are for a few seconds, go into Windows' advanced power settings, and increase the "Turn hard disk off after" timer to 20-30 minutes or never. What's probably happening is the HDD is spinning down to save power. When Windows needs something from the HDD, it is freezing everything while it waits for the drive to spin up.

If it freezes for about a second, then same thing is happening except the drive is probably parking its heads. Windows freezes as above while it waits for the heads to unpark. It seems the designers of hybrid drives somehow got it into their head that since oft-used files will be cached by the flash memory, they can spin down the drive or park its heads more aggressively. Unfortunately there's no simple fix for this one.

I wrote a small batch file you can run to test if either of the above two are the cause. Create a file called wakehdd.bat and copy the following into it:

:repeat
@echo %RANDOM% > tmp.txt
ping -n 8 127.0.0.1 > NUL
goto repeat

Now run wakehdd.bat (either in a command prompt or double-click it). Basically it writes a random number to the file tmp.txt every 8 seconds (random to thwart any caching). That prevents the HDD from spinning down or parking its heads. If either of those are the cause, the freezing will not happen while this batch file is running.

If your problem is head parking, the only other solution I've found is to use CrystalDiskInfo and disabling all the power management (APM) settings on the drive (move the slider to the right til it says FEh). That will take care of the problem, probably at the cost of a little shorter battery life. Unfortunately, the drives I've tried it on seem to reset their APM settings every reboot or few reboots, and you have to do it again.
http://crystalmark.info/download/index-e.html

 

[BradOZman]

So this issue is still not solved. I kinda gave up after scouring the internet for days and still try to look for a solution now and then when I get annoyed with it. Im starting to think it is not a hard drive issue but some device priority in windows 10.

So this only happens in windows 10 not windows 7.

I recently tried using a bluetooth mouse. When I first setup the BT mouse the problem compleatly vanished until next reboot. Then it was happening with the bluetooth mouse as well.

It's like win10 decides at some point that mouse input is of low prority or something.

Any ideas?

 

[Solandri]

So this only happens in windows 10 not windows 7.

That suggests a driver problem. Try the laptop manufacturer's website for all Windows 10 drivers, especially chipset drivers. If they don't have them, try the Intel or AMD websites for the appropriate chipset drivers for your motherboard's chipset (you'll have to dig into the specs for your laptop). If there are no Win10-specific drivers, try the Win 8.x, or the Win 7 drivers.

There is no driver specific to SSHDs (or SSDs or HDDs), but the chipset drivers do control the SATA ports. In my experience, the default Microsoft chipset drivers which get installed (and thus tricks you into thinking there are no missing drivers) are pretty bad and will frequently cause freezes like you describe.

 

[BradOZman]

So this only happens in windows 10 not windows 7.

That suggests a driver problem. Try the laptop manufacturer's website for all Windows 10 drivers, especially chipset drivers. If they don't have them, try the Intel or AMD websites for the appropriate chipset drivers for your motherboard's chipset (you'll have to dig into the specs for your laptop). If there are no Win10-specific drivers, try the Win 8.x, or the Win 7 drivers.

There is no driver specific to SSHDs (or SSDs or HDDs), but the chipset drivers do control the SATA ports. In my experience, the default Microsoft chipset drivers which get installed (and thus tricks you into thinking there are no missing drivers) are pretty bad and will frequently cause freezes like you describe.

Yeah Ive already done this. Tried all possible drivers including similar models of the laptop from the US. I just find it a bit strange that the problem disappeared completely when using a bluetooth mouse. Completely disappeared until next reboot. If it really was a driver issue with other device drivers why would the problem not persist regardless? Shouldnt the problem have still been there after 1st using a BT mouse?

 

[Solandri]

Is only the mouse input freezing? Or is the entire computer freezing? Your original statement that "the whole system grinds to a halt" made it sound like everything was freezing. But upon re-reading some of your other statements, you could be referring to only the mouse input freezing.

If it's just the mouse, does it happen with both wired and wireless mice?

 

[VernSummer00]

Hello,
It sounds like that your computer is stuck in too high usage problems.
You’d better do something to reduce the computer usage to go on:
1). Close all unnecessary games, programs and files using in the background.
2). Remove all unwanted programs and games off from your computer partitions.
3). Delete all trash histories, caches, temporary files and folders and more.
5). Check and clean your computer hard drive to keep it with enough free space all the time.
Please Note: Back up everything important before you start to delete or remove something unwanted in case of any data loss troubles.