HDD is giving me problems in games

stevo11z · Jan 4, 2017

I got my computer 2 months ago, evrything was working fine, then in some games ( not all )
i found a wierd half second freeze randomly when i play a game such as: League of Legends, CS GO, first i did not know what was the problem, i tried evrything, then i found that the hdd was the problem, as if i use another HDD (my friend's) it has no freezes, but if i put it on my HDD it has the freezes, i dont wanna buy a new hdd cuz i wanna save up money for something else.
can i somehow fix this without buying a new hdd?

and also if i record my gameplay's there are no freezes as well, but i dont want to record 24/7 if i dont need to :/
also my hdd is 5400rpm does that make a diffrence?
cuz i did not have any problems before with freezes

things i tried are
defragging

snurp85 · Jan 4, 2017

If your hard drive goes to sleep, it will take a moment for it to spin up again and find data that it needs, given that its only 5400rpm. Try going in to your power settings and telling the HD to never sleep. Even when you are in the middle of a game, a HD will stop spinning after it loads a file into memory. Since you have a slow drive, thats why you notice a slight lag when it then goes to load another file and has to start spinning again.

McVitas · Jan 4, 2017

It can also be bad or weak sectors. Open event viewer and search for events containing NTFS or disk. You might try using SpinRite, which often revives crashed or slow drives, but that might not be worth buying it if you have some really old drive...

atljsf · Jan 4, 2017

5400 rpm hard disk is a slow hard disk, tell us more about htat hard disk and also, just to discard any possible problem with it, run cristaldiskinfo to see if it reports any problems

have you run a checkdisk on it?

about defraggin, if you are on windows 7 and avobe, defrag doesn't do anything, only in vista and xp helps so is a waste of time

how full is the hard disk, tell us more details of the hard disk

stevo11z · Jan 4, 2017

HDD Model 931GB Western Digital WDC WD10EZRZ-00HTKB0 (SATA)

i have 628GB free currently.
And yes i have run a checkdisk on it in cmd, no errors so far

stevo11z · Jan 4, 2017

snurp85 :

Once i did that the freezes are now happening less, but they are still there :/

Solandri · Jan 4, 2017

Guessed from your first post that this was a WD hard drive.

WD uses very aggressive head parking timers on their laptop and 5400 RPM desktop drives. After like 10-15 seconds of inactivity, it will park the heads. When this happens and Windows needs to access the HDD again, Windows will freeze while it waits the half second or so for the heads to unpark. Unfortunately, this timeout is baked into the drive's firmware - there's no Windows setting you can change to lengthen it. Let me cut and paste from my previous posts on the topic on how to fix this:

To test if this is the issue, create a new file named test.bat on the HDD containing the following:

:repeat
@echo %RANDOM% > tmp.txt
ping -n 8 127.0.0.1 > NUL
goto repeat

Then in a command prompt, run test.bat on the HDD and leave it running. It writes a random number to the disk every 8 seconds, preventing the heads from parking. If this causes the freezes to disappear, then you are indeed suffering from this problem.

■You used to be able to fix it with a program WD put out called wdidle3.exe. But they redesigned their website in 2015 and the page hosting it disappeared. You might still be able to get it from the Internet Wayback Machine, though I don't know if it'll work on newer WD drives - it may brick your drive.
https://web.archive.org/web/20150908014215/http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=609&sid=113&lang=en
■You can just run the above batch file whenever you game.
■You can use CrystalDiskInfo and disable all the power management (APM) settings on the drive (move the slider to the right til it says FEh). It'll probably cost you a few minutes of battery life, and on mine it would reset every few reboots and I'd have to do it again.
http://crystalmark.info/download/index-e.html
■You can just replace the WD drive with a different drive (preferably a SSD). Please note that all the laptop WD green, SSHDs, and I suspect blue drives suffer from this short head parking timeout. I have been trying to steer budget buyers away from WD drives for over a year because of this issue.

snurp85 · Jan 4, 2017

Thats just the speed of the hard drive then. Accessing files takes time, even if it is up to speed at 5400rpm. You can get a 1tb, 7200rpm WD Black drive for $60 at most places. might be worth looking into. or a cheap TLC SSD

atljsf · Jan 4, 2017

ideally a ssd fixes most problems but price is a concern, always

a 7200 rpm hard disk is a better solution ofr games on this circumstance

stevo11z · Jan 5, 2017

Solandri :

Guessed from your first post that this was a WD hard drive.

WD uses very aggressive head parking timers on their laptop and 5400 RPM desktop drives. After like 10-15 seconds of inactivity, it will park the heads. When this happens and Windows needs to access the HDD again, Windows will freeze while it waits the half second or so for the heads to unpark. Unfortunately, this timeout is baked into the drive's firmware - there's no Windows setting you can change to lengthen it. Let me cut and paste from my previous posts on the topic on how to fix this:

To test if this is the issue, create a new file named test.bat containing the following:

:repeat
@echo %RANDOM% > tmp.txt
ping -n 8 127.0.0.1 > NUL
goto repeat

Then in a command prompt, run test.bat and leave it running. It writes a random number to the disk every 8 seconds, preventing the heads from parking. If this causes the freezes to disappear, then you are indeed suffering from this problem.

■You used to be able to fix it with a program WD put out called wdidle3.exe. But they redesigned their website in 2015 and the page hosting it disappeared. You might still be able to get it from the Internet Wayback Machine, though I don't know if it'll work on newer WD drives - it may brick your drive.
https://web.archive.org/web/20150908014215/http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=609&sid=113&lang=en
■You can just run the above batch file whenever you game.
■You can use CrystalDiskInfo and disable all the power management (APM) settings on the drive (move the slider to the right til it says FEh). It'll probably cost you a few minutes of battery life, and on mine it would reset every few reboots and I'd have to do it again.
http://crystalmark.info/download/index-e.html
■You can just replace the WD drive with a different drive (preferably a SSD). Please note that all the laptop WD green, SSHDs, and I suspect blue drives suffer from this short head parking timeout. I have been trying to steer budget buyers away from WD drives for over a year because of this issue.

Thank you so much that .bat file saved me
i dont know how to thank you more

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