HDD grinding noise ONLY under high stress.

[Cryptic7]

I'm using a WD Black 1TB HDD (windows installed on a separate SSD)

My problem is a specific one. Before I get to it though, some backstory: Under most every circumstance, the HDD performs perfectly fine. No noise, crashes, data scrambling or anything of the sort. However...

I'm a huge gamer, and I use some mods for Fallout 4 that make my loading screens last anywhere from 30 seconds to LITERALLY TEN MINUTES. The game runs a smooth 60fps on ultra once it finishes loading though.

I just got a brand new Ryzen 5 processor, RX 580 GPU, 16GB ram, and ASUS prime B350 mobo. My hardware is definitely not the cause of the loading. Research reveals it is indeed the mods causing the long load times, internet folks say it's because the HDD has to "seek" so much information from the mods all stored in different places on the HDD.
(I don't know very much in depth science on how hard drives work, so I have no idea if this is nonsense or not)

I solved this by downloading a loading accelerator mod; this is where the HDD problem comes into play. The mod JACKS up my FPS to almost 2000 during the loading screens, essentially brute-force fast forwarding through them, not actually reducing them. Whenever my fps goes above the 600-700 range, my HDD makes a soft, high pitch sort of grinding noise. The noise isn't really all that loud, just high pitch and... sandy... The noise ONLY happens under those conditions, and it stops once the game finishes loading, or the fps drops below the threshold.

My question: Is this going to suddenly kill my HDD one day? I'm going to back up my data either way, and I know that kind of stress is unhealthy for any kind of equipment, I just want to know HOW unhealthy it is. And if anyone knows how to stop it, or another way to reduce my loading times, I'm all ears.

 

[Someone Somewhere]

Buy an SSD. HDDs simply are slow at random-access reads and writes.

 

[RolandJS]

Is this HD a conventional HD? If so, maybe it's time to use Auslogics or Piriform's disk defragger on a bi-monthly basis? Or, are the MODs simply huge files from several folders that need to be loaded? Have you already made, or are you planning to make, full image backups of your OS and Data partitions onto an external HD?

 

[Cryptic7]

I can't afford to run my whole system on SSDs, they're just too expensive. (350$ for 1TB vs 72$ for 1TB) And I'm using a standard 1TB WD Back HDD (the first damn thing I said in my original post), set to auto defrag every week. The mods are decent in size, yes, but I think it's more a matter of bad optimization rather than sheer file size. And yes, I already made a backup of my whole HDD (I said I was going to if you read my whole post) My OS does not need a backup because it is installed on an SSD (also in my original post), so if my HDD DOES die, my windows install will be perfectly fine.

 

[RolandJS]

Have you found using a 3rd party defragger of the nonSSD HDD to be a solution, or, did you come up with another solution?

 

[aquielisunari]

I'm using a WD Black 1TB HDD (windows installed on a separate SSD)

My problem is a specific one. Before I get to it though, some backstory: Under most every circumstance, the HDD performs perfectly fine. No noise, crashes, data scrambling or anything of the sort. However...

I'm a huge gamer, and I use some mods for Fallout 4 that make my loading screens last anywhere from 30 seconds to LITERALLY TEN MINUTES. The game runs a smooth 60fps on ultra once it finishes loading though.

I just got a brand new Ryzen 5 processor, RX 580 GPU, 16GB ram, and ASUS prime B350 mobo. My hardware is definitely not the cause of the loading. Research reveals it is indeed the mods causing the long load times, internet folks say it's because the HDD has to "seek" so much information from the mods all stored in different places on the HDD.
(I don't know very much in depth science on how hard drives work, so I have no idea if this is nonsense or not)

I solved this by downloading a loading accelerator mod; this is where the HDD problem comes into play. The mod JACKS up my FPS to almost 2000 during the loading screens, essentially brute-force fast forwarding through them, not actually reducing them. Whenever my fps goes above the 600-700 range, my HDD makes a soft, high pitch sort of grinding noise. The noise isn't really all that loud, just high pitch and... sandy... The noise ONLY happens under those conditions, and it stops once the game finishes loading, or the fps drops below the threshold.

My question: Is this going to suddenly kill my HDD one day? I'm going to back up my data either way, and I know that kind of stress is unhealthy for any kind of equipment, I just want to know HOW unhealthy it is. And if anyone knows how to stop it, or another way to reduce my loading times, I'm all ears.

It would seem that Fallout 4 and the mods are the root cause of the issue and the accelerator is the genesis. Why can't you simply rotate that game into your SSD?

(I don't know very much in depth science on how hard drives work, so I have no idea if this is nonsense or not)

It isn't nonsense by any stretch. Take a vinyl record and find a song. I'll use an MP3 player and do the same. A CD player will expedite that speed. But a MP3 player is even quicker. The HDD has a platter inside

It has to search that platter for all your files. An SSD on the other hand isn't analog

so the reading and writing times are both expedited.

The noise doesn't sound healthy by any means. Not sure how the accelerator works but I would instead move at least Fallout 4 to your SSD.

 

[Someone Somewhere]

SSDs can still fail (and may even be harder to recover from in the event of a failure; don't say you don't need a backup.

You don't have to put everything on the SSD, but putting particularly frequently played games on it is a good idea. Don't be the guy with a 64GB SSD...

 

[Cryptic7]

It would seem that Fallout 4 and the mods are the root cause of the issue and the accelerator is the genesis. Why can't you simply rotate that game into your SSD?

Installing the game to my SSD is gonna be the next thing I try. I'm just reluctant because that means I'm gonna have to re-download and reinstall the game plus every mod. (don't wanna because I'm lazy, buutt... I got no choice.) I tried just copy pasting the data into my SSD, but Steam can get reeeaaaally pissy about games that aren't in the steam/steamapps/common directory. My whole game just crashed on launch when I cut-pasted the files over, so a manual reinstall is gonna be required to make it work.

"putting particularly frequently played games on it is a good idea. Don't be the guy with a 64GB SSD..."

You see, that's the thing... I have a 250GB SSD, but I'm the kind of guy that only plays any given game for like a few weeks then gets bored of it. Also I'm too lazy to uninstall shit. I'd end up clogging my SSD with crap I never play anymore. Besides, I've never had THIS much trouble with any one game before. Before I got new hardware, I had some fps trouble, but lowering the game settings was usually enough to get it playable. I'm not a very picky guy, but come on... TEN MINUTE loading times are a straight up joke.