Question Hard drive maxing out when I play any game on it, occasional freezing and rare full freeze

[wawawawa123]

I have a Seagate Portable 5TB External Hard Drive that keeps maxing out at 100 percent in task manager when I play games installed on it. It leads to frequent freezing and stuttering, and sometimes my entire computer will just freeze and I have to hard reset. I did chkdsk and it came back fine, and I did a full virus scan and that also came back fine.

 

[rgd1101]

exact model of this portable 5tb?
is this a hdd? they yes. they are slow

 

[USAFRet]

I have a Seagate Portable 5TB External Hard Drive that keeps maxing out at 100 percent in task manager when I play games installed on it. It leads to frequent freezing and stuttering, and sometimes my entire computer will just freeze and I have to hard reset. I did chkdsk and it came back fine, and I did a full virus scan and that also came back fine.

Yes, this can happen, especially with an external drive.

The drive and USB interface can't feed the rest of the system fast enough.

 

[DSzymborski]

HDDs are still playable in a lot of games, but an external HDD connected through USB? Anything of significant size, that's going to be a nightmare.

 

[wawawawa123]

HDDs are still playable in a lot of games, but an external HDD connected through USB? Anything of significant size, that's going to be a nightmare.

the thing is everything was fine for over a year i believe, and only suddenly i've been getting these issues. smaller games, bigger games, anything in between. could it possibly be that 3/5tb are used and thats stressing it?

 

[wawawawa123]

Yes, this can happen, especially with an external drive.

The drive and USB interface can't feed the rest of the system fast enough.

ah ok thank you. makes sense

 

[wawawawa123]

exact model of this portable 5tb?
is this a hdd? they yes. they are slow

https://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Portable-External-Hard-Drive/dp/B07VS8QCXC/ref=sr_1_1

 

[Bob.B]

I have a Seagate Portable 5TB External Hard Drive that keeps maxing out at 100 percent in task manager when I play games installed on it. It leads to frequent freezing and stuttering, and sometimes my entire computer will just freeze and I have to hard reset. I did chkdsk and it came back fine, and I did a full virus scan and that also came back fine.

Show a screenshot from.....crystal disk info.....for this disk.

 

[Ralston18]

Also open the Disk Management window and expand so all can seen and clearly read.

Take a screenshot and post the screenshot here via imgur (www.imgur.com > green "New post" icon).

 

[Misgar]

I have a Seagate Portable 5TB External Hard Drive that keeps maxing out at 100 percent in task manager when I play games installed on it

It's quite likely your external hard disk is SMR, not CMR, which is bad news if games frequently write data back to the drive. SMR is "OKish" for long term archives, but I wouldn't use SMR drives for games, regardless of whether they're internal or external.

https://www.howtogeek.com/803276/cmr-vs.-smr-hard-drives-whats-the-difference/

I stopped using my 11 USB3 hard drives (desktop 3.5in) in 2020 and switched to internal CMR drives. CMR can be a lot faster and don't suffer as badly when updating hundreds of small files.

Ideally you'd run your games from an internal SATA SSD or better still, an internal M.2 NVMe drive. Failing that, external SATA drives or external M.2 NVMe drives in USB3 housings should work much faster than a 2.5in SMR hard disk.

You'd need to interrogate your 5TB Seagate to determine the exact model number of the disk inside, then search for it in a CMR/SMR database. If it turns out to be SMR, you'll have an answer for the lack of performance.

https://www.seagate.com/gb/en/products/cmr-smr-list/
https://darwinsdata.com/what-seagate-drives-use-smr/

I have a 4TB Crucial X6 portable SSD (USB-C interface) which runs at up to 700Mbytes/second. It's nothing special as this review make clear, but it was cheap on Black Friday 2024. The Crucial X9 and X10 are faster, as are the Kingston XS1000 and XS2000.
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/crucial-x6-4tb-portable-ssd-review