High End PC, Reporting High FPS in games but the gameplay is jittery. Found the problem can't find the solution.

[mikemefistous]

SO i've been suffering from this issue for a long time now, but i finally found the problem to it

I have 1 Samsung 850 Evo 250gb SSD for my operating system and 2 video games(Rainbow Six Siege and Battlefield 1)

I have a Seagate Hybrid HDD 1 tb 7200rpm for programs and games.

I also have a Barracuda 1.5tb HDD 7200rpm for my files such as movies,setups etc. (terrible condition, yo can hear the pin scratching it and the hard drive about to fail noises & performance)

So my issue is, my whole PC is slowing down because of my 3rd drive, when playing video games.

My FPS will remain high, but i'll have an immense amount of input lag and jittery blurry images making games unplayable.

It wasn't as bad, but as the hard drive became worse, so did the issue and now most of the time i can't play a single game on my PC because of it.

I thought it was my bent pins and my 6 year old i5 760 cpu that was causing this issue, so i upgraded this summer to an i5 6600k and Z170x Gaming 3 Mobo and 16gb DDR4 2666MHz RAM

But that didn't fix my issue.

I kept noticing that defragging by bad hard drive, made games much smoother and playable.

However it's at a point now, that the drive is about to fail at any momment, problem is, i don't have the money to replace him for now, so i'll have to wait till christmas to get some.

Until then, is there any solution on how to keep this drive enabled and maintain good performance in games?


I've tried disabling it from my BIOS and the PC was a beast once again.

I went also to my Virtual Memory and made sure, that only my SSD provides virtual memory and none of those hard drives, but that didn't fix much.

So, for the next month, i'll have to endure this, but can anyone tell me, why is this hard drive causing my whole PC to freeze for 1-2 seconds during games and causing all sorts of artifacts?

When i am clearly not recording anything or using that hard drive at all while gaming, why is it affecting my games' performance?

 

[13thmonkey]

If a drive is showing signs of failing, treat it as if you will be told it will fail the next time you turn it on, now what do you do? That should be your course of action.

 

[hdmark]

Maybe the cpu is trying to correct issues with the HDD wasting some of its performance? honestly im not quite sure... but in case you havent done it... i would backup all of the files on that HDD that you want and then really look into disconnecting it till you can afford another drive

 

[TMTOWTSAC]

Hard drives communicate with the OS all the time, even when they aren't explicitly reading or writing files. For instance, anytime the computer polls devices it communicates. Open your computer and it will tell you how many drives you have attached and the amount of free space they contain, that's data being sent by your drive. Plug in a new device and they have to negotiate with existing devices for bandwidth. Superfetch caching, fragmentation status reports, etc.

Your OS and other devices expect a timely response to all those queries. But, the dying drive is probably throwing errors left and right. Read errors and SMART monitoring and system alerts. You're probably hitting timeouts and interrupts and a steady slew of resend requests. So everything stops until it manages to respond.

Seriously, you shouldn't be using that drive at all. If you can't afford to replace it, you probably don't have it properly backed up. It could die instantly at any time, and anything on it would be lost.