Question What can I do to prevent my harddrive from beeing used 100% while playing Games?

[The_Real_Laepi]

I have a Ryzen 5 3600, a AsRock B450 Mpro4 (Bios Update), a RTX 2070, a Patriot Burst SSD(OS) and a 2TB Toshiba P300 Hard Drive, which my issue is related to. I have my Games on the Harddrive and when im playing them, my harddrive goes up to 100% usage with no reads and writes. I have reinstalled Windows several times and have done Bios resets etc. I have also deactivated SysMain and other Programs, to see if it would have an effect. Please leave a response.

 

[rgd1101]

how full is the ssd?

 

[The_Real_Laepi]

The problem is with the Hard Drive . The SSD has 63.7 GB left and the HDD has 1,26 TB left

 

[The_Real_Laepi]

Would be nice if you could reply bc its pretty late at my place

 

[JamesR404v2]

Did you set a swap file on the problematic hard drive? How much free system memory do you have when this issue is occuring? It could be that the game is constantly reading files from the disk.

Is the game stored on the 'problematic disk'?

In the Windows Device Manager check the harddisk properties, there under Policies ensure the option "Enable write caching on the drive" is ticked / enabled. This will slightly improve performance but you do risk losing data if your PC suddenly loses power.

How do you determine if the disk is being used 100% ? How do you determine if there are reads or writes? If in the Windows Task manager the disk is used 100%

There is also the possibility that a process is responsible that you are not seeing in the Windows Task manager, like a virus or malware or spyware. A virus can also attach itself to an already installed executable like your game. But you already said you've reinstalled Windows - did you also reinstall that game? Or is the game on another drive that's not wiped by reinstalling windows (because if not any infection will just stay there).There's a good post here explaining what other apps you can use to examine your processes, this might help find the cause (virus or not): https://superuser.com/questions/102...o-corresponding-process-shows-in-task-manager

How old is the disk? (how many years or months has it been in use)

Good luck! I wish the problem will disappear soon for you

 

[The_Real_Laepi]

Hey! Thanks for the quick response!
Question 1: I have already tried that.
Question 2: ~8 / 32 GB
Question 3: Yes the Games are stored on the problematic disk
Question 4/5: Both in the Task Manager and perfon.exe
Question 6: As mentioned, the Games are not on the SSD, which Windows is installed on. I will look after a Virus and inform u about the results.
Question 7: The disk is about 1.5 Years old. Note: I have swapped an older 1 TB disk for the 2 TB disk recently and sometimes had that problem before. So i dont think, that the Problem is with the HDD itself but with the software.

 

[SkyNetRising]

Hey! Thanks for the quick response!

Can you show screenshot from HDtune health?
(upload to imgur.com and post link)

 

[The_Real_Laepi]

https://imgur.com/a/cGicjX6

View: https://imgur.com/a/cGicjX6

 

[SkyNetRising]

Lots of Interface CRC errors.
Either bad sata cable or sata controller overheating.

 

[The_Real_Laepi]

Btw i have done a Virus scan of both drives and have deleted any suspicous programs, but the problem still occurs. I guess i will need to search for a new Sata cable

 

[The_Real_Laepi]

I think its a bad sata cable because my other SSD is completely fine. I will inform you about this, when I have a new Sata cable

 

[The_Real_Laepi]

I dont know why, but I now have the problem with both my SSD and HDD! Please help me it sucks to have such lags/stutters in Windows and in Games.

 

[mdd1963]

A 1 TB Crucial MX500 is $106 at Newegg...;if that's not enough space, the 2 TB model is $209....

As there are doubts as to potential malware possibly hiding, vs. glitched OS, etc., I'd simply remove the other two drives, and start with a fresh install of the OS and games to the new SSD, with a new SATA cable thrown in for good measure. You can reconnect the other two drives afterwards, delete partitions, and quick format them.
A failing drive can wreak havoc with background index reads failing, retrying, etc...; I've even had a formatted but failing drive lag out a system whenever it was even connected. See if CrystalDiskInfo shows any issues with your current spinning drive.

 

[The_Real_Laepi]

The thing is: I dont think its a problem with my SSD or HDD. I think it would be pretty unlikely for both The HDD and a SSD to fail in such a short period of time. Might have something to do with my mainboard, because and older HDD i had the same issue with, is now in another pc and works 100% fine.