[SOLVED] HDD hanging problem

[ivoemilkolev123]

Hello my HDD has some hanging problems and I want them to get fixed. I tested it on games:
GTA V is bad, CS:S runs smoothly, CS:GO has it too, NFS Carbon a little bit and other lighter games too.
The point is I hate massive frame and response drops for a 12 seconds period. I tried eith Windows HDD tools defragmentating, error check, bad sectors check, reinstalling OS and nothing works. I've had Seatools ran on every test and every time said passed. Tried Diskeeper, but can't really understand how it works.

The system specs are listed here:
AMD Athlon 64 x2 5200+ works fine
Gigabyte R7 240 OC 2GB edition works abslt fine
Some 4gb RAM memory
Asus M2A-MX works fine too
Seagate ST3500418AS ATA that doesn't seem legit.

So how can I possibly fix it?

 

[Deleted member 14196]

Test the HDD with SeaTools. it's free, go download it and install and run it to test your HDD

 

[LUFD1314]

Does the hard drive make any noises when experiencing the frame and response drops? This sounds more like a memory/CPU issue. With only 4 GB of RAM, you will experience these problems with games like GTA V that are memory intensive. According to Steam, the minimum memory requirement for GTA V is 4 GB. Therefore, you aren't leaving any memory for your operating system and are running into issues.

 

[ivoemilkolev123]

Test the HDD with SeaTools. it's free, go download it and install and run it to test your HDD

I already did and ran buncha test and says passed. Can u tell my a test I should do with this problem?

 

[ivoemilkolev123]

Does the hard drive make any noises when experiencing the frame and response drops? This sounds more like a memory/CPU issue. With only 4 GB of RAM, you will experience these problems with games like GTA V that are memory intensive. According to Steam, the minimum memory requirement for GTA V is 4 GB. Therefore, you aren't leaving any memory for your operating system and are running into issues.

So actually it isn't. I have this issue on lighter games as I said NFS GTA San Andreas only CS source runs smoothly. Gta V used to run good without those huge frame drops. And no it doesn't do any sounds or screeches. Its quiet.
Even my 2004 PC Pentium 4 runs NFS without those lags

 

[ivoemilkolev123]

Oh it is Windows 7 Ultimate btw,so it doesn't use that much RAM

 

[Solandri]

Agreed that this sounds more like insufficient RAM. When Windows doesn't have enough RAM, it will start swapping unused memory pages to disk. That is, it takes the data in RAM for programs/services which hasn't been used in a while, and writes them to the hard drive in something called the pagefile. That frees up the RAM to be used by your game.

Since HDDs are basically useless for doing more than one thing at a time, during this page swapping process, any other HDD accesses are going to lag badly. If your game happens to need to load new textures (very common in GTA), it will lag because it can take several seconds to tens of seconds for the HDD to finish swapping and retrieve the textures.

Try leaving Task Manager running (right-click a blank section of the taskbar on the bottom, and click Task Manager from the popup menu). On the Performance tab, it'll create historical graphs of your memory and disk use. If you see memory approaching or at 100% and disk activity spiking right around the times you're experiencing lag, then it is indeed page swapping.

If that's the case, the best solution is to buy more RAM. However, it seems 4GB is listed as the max for this particular motherboard (the system is over 10 years old), so that's not an option. So try trimming down the amount of memory your system is using prior to starting the game. Close any open programs (including browsers). Kill any programs which stay resident (show up in the popup toolbar in the lower right - looks like an up arrow). And maybe go through Windows services and disable any that you don't need.

[Guide] Which Windows 7 Services are Safe to Disable? - AskVG

[Guide] Which Windows 7 Services are Safe to Disable? - We have posted service configuration guides for Windows XP and Windows Vista in past and now its turn of Windows 7. In this tutorial we'll learn about the

www.askvg.com

If you have plans to upgrade in the next year or so, you should be able to mitigate the lag by buying a SSD and using it as your boot drive. Unlike a HDD, SSDs can easily handle multiple read/write requests simultaneously. So if the game requests data from the SSD while Windows is busy swapping, the game won't have to wait and you won't get any lag (or you'll get a lot less of it than with the HDD). However, the reason you should only get a SSD if you're upgrading soon is because pagefile writes can rapidly eat through a smaller SSD's write endurance lifespan. So it's not something you should subject it to permanently. You can reuse the SSD on the new system when you do upgrade.

If you're still having the problem and don't want to upgrade hardware, there's one last thing which might help (and I stress "might"). The pagefile is a system file, so defragmenting can't move it. If it happened to be written or enlarged when the disk was badly fragmented, then the pagefile may be fragmented, causing swapping operations to go a lot slower than necessary. Go into the pagefile settings and disable it. Reboot. Now defragment the drive. When the defragment is complete, create a new custom pagefile whose min and max size is about 1.5x your RAM (so 6 GB in your case). That should make a pagefile which is one contiguous file on the HDD, making pagefile accesses quicker.

What is the Page File in Windows 10?

The Windows page file is a special file that holds data your RAM cannot hold when it reaches its limits. Your system RAM has a limit. If your system tries to exceed that limit, it can pass some of the data off into the page file. It isn't the most efficient way to manage your

www.online-tech-tips.com

 

[ivoemilkolev123]

So I did as he said and I should tell that the system and the game ran more smoothly, but the frame and response drops are still there, but they appear less frequently than before. RAM on idle is now 1.1 GB out of 4 GB Tests shown that:

NFS Carbon has the lags, and there was around 2.5 GB of memory available at that moment, got bikes spikes of disk usage and I can't define if the peak is the lag or the bottom ones.

CS:GO is worse now, no comment

CS:S works flawless

Quake III Arena had some random lags (not on praticular places on the map), weren't long and hadn't that big framedrops either (light version of the drops)

So I don't really know if it fixed it or not. More likely not. The system behaves better but has the same lag every time.
I assume that there are some crapped out parts of the HDD that will not get fixed.

And yes I brought my new SSD from my modern PC (Samsung 850 Evo), but the PC can't boot it up, so I can try with different storage drive (with Win 10 Pro installed).

I assume that I really need a new storage device.

If someone has more options, feel free to tell.

 

[ivoemilkolev123]

So it appears that i need a BIOS update, saw it on Asus page that fixes this kind of issue for this CPU. Guess it is really a CPU/Memory BIOS issue.