WD Green issue as secondary drive when gaming

[Kritya]

When I built my computer I went for the cheapest drive I could that was 3tb, which ended up being a WD green drive, at the time I had no idea what the colours referred to, and green as a primary drive was a bad choice but hindsight. This was my primary drive until recently when I got an SSD. However while playing games from the WD drive I noticed that I get freezes every so often for a couple seconds, this doesn't happen when loading the game from SSD so it's definitely a storage issue.

While going through my PC, I noticed that if I didn't access the hard drive for a while the next time I wanted to browse it, the drive had to spin up and it took a while to load in windows explorer. This is what I think is happening in games, where it's trying to grab a particle effect or something from the hard drive but it can't display it until it's spun up so it freezes.

My questions are, is this possible? And is this "sleep" mode something unique to the green drive over their blue or black drives? And in tandem, will swapping the green drive out for a blue or black resolve the issue?

 

[utroz]

It is a power saving feature. You might be able to tweak it with the right tools.

 

[martinch]

If you go into the power saving settings in Windows (via the Control Panel), what does it say for letting the HDDs go to sleep/be powered off? By default, Windows will shut down the disks after sufficient period of inactivity - you might find just bumping this up to an hour (or never) fixes it.

 

[Kritya]

The power setting was 20 minutes, changed it and currently playing diablo to test if it's improved.

Still getting the stuttering.

 

[Kritya]

To confirm it was this specific hard drive I copied the install over to an external Toshiba HDD and the game ran fine. I don't think the hard drives failing because this issue only appeared once I made it the secondary drive.

Things I have tried so far:
Extended test with WD's DLG software
Zero fill with the same software followed by a full format through disk manager
Unticked the "automatically manage paging file size for all drives" box and set paging file size to none for the HDD

I'm considering buying a WD blue 1tb drive for games and then just using the green drive for file storage, but would rather figure this out, as I had none of these issues when the green drive was my primary drive. The only difference that was made was adding the SSD and converting the green drive to GPT in order to get the full 3TB of storage.