[SOLVED] Games stuttering when moving to HDD

[Mr Cruss]

Hi, I have a question, I have a gaming laptop (Gigabyte G5KC)
Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060
Intel Core i5-10500H
Micron 8ATF1G64HZ-3G2R1 2x8GB
nvme sx8200pnp 512GB

Recently I purchased an HDD because I needed more storage for my games and other personal stuff so I purchased a super cheap one (Seagate Mobile HDD ST2000LM007 2TB) and I moved some of my games to the HDD but when I played them I noticed that some of them started stuttering a little bit (just one short freeze every 4 - 5 minutes) and that didn't happened on the SSD.

I haven't tried nothing yet other than lowering the graphic settings in the games themselves, I don't feel like I need an urgent fix or anything because the games are still perfectly playable even in max graphic settings, it's just that little freeze every now and then but I would like to know why this happens and if there's some kind of fix for that issue because as I said before this only happens when I move the games to the HDD, if I move them back to the SSD they come back to normal. Personally, I would like to be able to save them in the HDD because I don't really care about the loading times and I have a decent amount of games so I don't want to fill the whole SSD.

 

[CountMike]

Hi, I have a question, I have a gaming laptop (Gigabyte G5KC)
Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060
Intel Core i5-10500H
Micron 8ATF1G64HZ-3G2R1 2x8GB
nvme sx8200pnp 512GB

Recently I purchased an HDD because I needed more storage for my games and other personal stuff so I purchased a super cheap one (Seagate Mobile HDD ST2000LM007 2TB) and I moved some of my games to the HDD but when I played them I noticed that some of them started stuttering a little bit (just one short freeze every 4 - 5 minutes) and that didn't happened on the SSD.

I haven't tried nothing yet other than lowering the graphic settings in the games themselves, I don't feel like I need an urgent fix or anything because the games are still perfectly playable even in max graphic settings, it's just that little freeze every now and then but I would like to know why this happens and if there's some kind of fix for that issue because as I said before this only happens when I move the games to the HDD, if I move them back to the SSD they come back to normal. Personally, I would like to be able to save them in the HDD because I don't really care about the loading times and I have a decent amount of games so I don't want to fill the whole SSD.

USB or SATA connection ? In either case, a slow disk without or with some cache, impacts CPU as well as memory taking cycles from them so more demanding games can suffer while disk is active.

 

[Mr Cruss]

USB or SATA connection ? In either case, a slow disk without or with some cache, impacts CPU as well as memory taking cycles from them so more demanding games can suffer while disk is active.

SATA connection, the HDD is a 5400 rpm one so it's kinda slow, but actually, the games that present the issue the most are the low-spec ones (League of Legends, Phasmophobia, No more room in hell...) so it's kind of weird, is there something I can do?

 

[CountMike]

SATA connection, the HDD is a 5400 rpm one so it's kinda slow, but actually, the games that present the issue the most are the low-spec ones (League of Legends, Phasmophobia, No more room in hell...) so it's kind of weird, is there something I can do?

Not much except to switch to SSD, it's just nature of the beast. Can also de-fragment it with optimization but that doesn't last long. Run a Disk benchmark to see if it's speed conforms manufacturer's claims.

 

[Satan-IR]

If I'm not mistaken that is an SMR drive and those are more suited for archival use, kind of write once read later few/many times later. Not really ideal or even suitable for eveyday use as system drives or drives to store and load games from.

As CountMike said above you'd be much better off with an SSD. It won't affect FPS and game performance as far as graphics are concerned but will reduce game load times and level/map/texture load times in-game.

 

[Mr Cruss]

Thanks for the replies, I wanted to have more storage for my games and other personal information but I guess I should've invested more and maybe purchased a second SSD instead of the HDD, well... it is what it is.