[SOLVED] Gaming using external hard drive with a faulty internal hard drive.

[samjack]

Hi, I'm using Dell g5 with 8gb ram, i7 processor, gtx 1050ti and OS on 128gb ssd.
My laptop's internal hard drive got corrupted few months ago showing bad sectors. My laptop's performance reduced from then on. So I've been playing csgo and gta 5 using an external hard drive having 5400rpm. Although csgo has been playing good most of the time but while playing gta I'm getting stutters and laptop gets stuck making me to do forcefully shut down.
I've been also getting BSOD (blue screen of death) errors like Memory_Mgmt, code_dumped etc with casual usage and more often while gaming. Very frequently getting memory management bsod error.
CPU usage is 40% and ram usage is almost 85% playing playing gta 5 and ram usage with no applications running is more than 50% with int. hard drive usage 100%. So, it this all happening because of the faulty internal hard drive or the OS got corrupted or something? Please advice me. Thank you.

 

[RealBeast]

I would replace the internal drive -- an external drive will be too slow through USB to play. Have you tried reinstalling your OS after removing the internal HDD?

 

[madmatt30]

Your ram paging file is stored on the internal drive, as soom as physical ram usage hits 80% it will start writing a page file to the internal drive.

If its faulty that's going to cause big issues hence your memory management errors when ram usage is high.

Regardless of that gta v is never going to play well from a 5400rpm external drive, it constantly spools data the whole time.

 

[samjack]

I would replace the internal drive -- an external drive will be too slow through USB to play. Have you tried reinstalling your OS after removing the internal HDD?

No, I've haven't reinstalled OS as it was on ssd. Although I did reset a couple of times.

 

[samjack]

Your ram paging file is stored on the internal drive, as soom as physical ram usage hits 80% it will start writing a page file to the internal drive.

If its faulty that's going to cause big issues hence your memory management errors when ram usage is high.

Irregardless of that gta v is never going to play well from a 5400rpm external drive, it constantly spools data the whole time.

Yes, that makes sense as the RAM is limited to 8GB OS is using the internal hard drive for paging purpose. I will replace the hard drive asap. But I've been getting these bsod errors randomly even on low main memory usage with all the applications closed. What do you think might be the reason for this?

 

[madmatt30]

A faulty OS drive can cause all sorts of mischief in all honesty.
I assume you ran a chkdsk command on the drive, did it actually manage to remove/replace sectors from use??
The 100% disk usage makes me think the hard drive is physically faulty is some way.

Also have you run a malware or virus scan? , would definitely be worthwhile.

 

[samjack]

A faulty OS drive can cause all sorts of mischief in all honesty.
I assume you ran a chkdsk command on the drive, did it actually manage to remove/replace sectors from use??
The 100% disk usage makes me think the hard drive is physically faulty is some way.

Also have you run a malware or virus scan? , would definitely be worthwhile.

OS is on ssd and it shows no errors on tests. I ran hard drive on some software and it showed bad sectors, must be a physical damage. Also the disk usage is not 100% all time.
I ran Malwarebytes full scan and deleted virus files. The system had abruptly stopped on so many occasions so maybe the OS has corrupted? Will just system reset workout without doing a clean install of the OS.

 

[RealBeast]

OS is on ssd and it shows no errors on tests. I ran hard drive on some software and it showed bad sectors, must be a physical damage. Also the disk usage is not 100% all time.
I ran Malwarebytes full scan and deleted virus files. The system had abruptly stopped on so many occasions so maybe the OS has corrupted? Will just system reset workout without doing a clean install of the OS.

If you found any malware, it is best to do a clean re-install because it often makes registry key changes that may randomly cause issues. And during the re-install have only the SSD attached, no other drives.