Importance of hard drive for multitasking during heavy downloads

[A-12 Cygnus]

When I am downloading at fast speeds (say around 4mb/s) and simultaneously watching a video or browsing online, my computer often experiences lag and freezing issues. While observing this my CPU is only around 60%, RAM at 30% so I'm thinking it must be due to my WD blue hard drive.

Is my hard drive likely to be the culprit and if so, presumably an ssd will prevent this?

 

[getochkn]

check disk usage. I get this trying to download too many torrents or torrents with many files in them. Look in utorrent if you use it, it will show in the status bar that there is a "disk cache overload 100%" letting you know that it can't keep up with the read/writes.

 

[giantbucket]

4Mbps is SLOW as far as a hard drive is concerned. that's only 0.4MB/s and most drives can easily go 10 times faster even for small file chunks.

do you have just one drive for everything (OS, downloads, movies)? or do you have separate drives for all these tasks? ideally, you should have one drive for the OS, another drive for your data / media files, and hopefully another small old drive used as the thrash drive onto which torrents and other random downloads are shoved - they stay there until you clean them up, ditch excess files, and move them to their rightful final home.

 

[PxPx]

4Mbps is SLOW as far as a hard drive is concerned. that's only 0.4MB/s and most drives can easily go 10 times faster even for small file chunks.

do you have just one drive for everything (OS, downloads, movies)? or do you have separate drives for all these tasks? ideally, you should have one drive for the OS, another drive for your data / media files, and hopefully another small old drive used as the thrash drive onto which torrents and other random downloads are shoved - they stay there until you clean them up, ditch excess files, and move them to their rightful final home.

I think he meant 4 MBs, cos yeah I agree, 4Mbps is SLOW! I get 15MBs download and have no problem with my 2TB Western Digital Black @ 7200RPM being able to keep up, even downloading and watching a movie from the same HDD.

To the OP. I agree with getochkn, if they are torrents, then it could be disk overload. Having your OS (and apps) on SSD and doing everything else from another HDD would be the way to go.

 

[A-12 Cygnus]

mb/s for megabytes per second and mbit/s for megabits per second. Guess I will have to invest in an ssd to sort out this disc overload, thanks; computers = moneypit!

 

[giantbucket]

b = bit
B = byte
$ = insufficient
separate drives = better