Question Old HDD was causing PC to stutter, uninstalled, got better, new NVME brought the problem back. What gives?

[Swampwarlock]

Specs:
I9-11900k
Nvidia 3070ti
Corsair CMW32GX4M2D3600C18 2x16GB
ASUS Prime H570-Plus
WD_BLACK 1TB SN850X NVMe (main gaming drive)
Western Digital 250GB WD Blue 3D NAND (dedicated boot drive)
Samsung SSD 860 EVO 1TB 2.5 Inch SATA III (main storage drive)
Windows 10

Like the title says. I was getting constant stuttering (hard stutters every 15-20 seconds) in all games I was playing. I saw that I was getting huge spikes of disk usage in my performance overview in task manager from my old HDD that coincided with the spikes. I unplugged the HDD (and just ran a 2.5" SSD for games and a small dedicated NVME boot drive for Windows 10) and saw immediate relief. I got a new 1TB Gen 4 NVME, installed it, and transferred all of my games over to it. Immediately noticed that the stuttering is back again, in all games.

My CPU/GPU temps look great, I'm not constantly capping out at max GPU/CPU usage, I have the XMP RAM profiles correctly enabled and the RAM correctly slotted. My PC scores very highly in all benchmarking. What gives? I'm dying over here. Please help. I go from 140+ constant fps down to 10 FPS for a quarter second and right back up to the 140+. I do see some tiny bumps (1-3%) in disk usage from my NVME's when this happens, but nothing drastic. I can provide any additional info/scoring that you might think would be relevant.

 

[boju]

Reconfigure your drive situation. OS + games on nvme. Additional games on sata ssd. WD blue as storage.

 

[Swampwarlock]

Reconfigure your drive situation. OS + games on nvme. Additional games on sata ssd. WD blue as storage.

Can do, but do you mind explaining why this would be the solution?

 

[boju]

I have a hunch Windows recourses, pagefile, driver executive, is suffering on 3D nand drive. If Windows suffers performance so do games. + Windows should be on the fastest drive possible including games.

 

[Swampwarlock]

Not arguing, just genuinely curious. Why would the stuttering have stopped when I unplugged my HDD and then come back when I installed a new NVME?

 

[boju]

Coincidence probably

 

[boju]

You'll be better off doing it that way. Nvme communicating directly to cpu, faster iops associated with Windows.

 

[Swampwarlock]

Just stopping by to say that this worked!

I do have a question though. I reinstalled windows from a usb drive. In doing so, I completely wiped all current drives and formatted/wiped the recovery/boot sections of the old m.2. However, when I now go into my bios, it doesn't list my new NVME as my boot drive (even though windows is installed upon it), it still lists the old 120gb m.2 (which is completely wiped and empty).

Is this problematic? And why wouldn't be updated to display the NVME with windows?

 

[boju]

My guess is if all drives were connected whilst installing Windows, Windows may have configured bootloader on the other m2. That's my only explanation of that. Not sure if bootloader partition is hidden or not. Show pictures of diskpart.

If that is what happened, it's not all bad. Just means if you removed old m2 Windows won't boot until it's returned. Hmm, test it out, remove old m2 and see if Windows boots still. If doesn't then that's why.