Installing games onto new hard drive solve stuttering?

Hi all, I'll keep this very quick. Basically I was having terrible stuttering with Batman Archam City. However I have since installed it on a second hard drive which I installed only last week and the stuttering has been drastically reduced to almost non existent. The thing that is confusing me is that this second hard drive isnt exactly new, its from my sisters computer.

So the question is, was my other hard drive, the one which I had Batman AC installed on wearing out? or do games run better when they are installed on a separate drive from your OS?

Games run better when they are installed on a separate drive from your OS (very slightly)

Yes it can, the main drive you had before could have be heavily fragmented. The drive could have been lower rpm, and less cache. Platter amounts also can play a role in performance. You could have also had things running bogging down the drive too. OS plus games on a single drive can be at times not enough to stream data fluidly. Ive have for a very long time installed my games onto another dedicated harddrive to speed things things up preventing OS needs from interfering .

I'd agree with the OS/games in the same hard drive scenario if the RAM amount is small. How much RAM do you have?

Also, some hard drives have bigger buffers than others.

I have 8GB RAM

8gb RAM? You have plenty then. 04dcarraher covered most of the remaining possibilities.

That said, I run my games on the same hard drive as the OS with no issues, including my laptop which has a mere 5400rpm SATA hard drive.

There's no real difference between where your game is installed (2nd drive vs os drive).

Lagging could be what you saw, but it's unlikely. The only time you'd "lag" due to the hard drive is when the cpu is pulling data from the hdd too slow to be fed to memory, which is unlikely, though possible on some game's like Arkham. Usually when a game loads a level, you wait because you are pulling data off the hd and feeding it to memory, which is MUCH faster than even an ssd, let alone a hdd. Hdd would only cause stutters in instances where you are loading something and it takes too long to get the data off the hdd. Most games address this by loading things into memory. Like...95% of games. Some games can't do that, such as wow, just cause 2, etc, because there are no load times. I'm not sure if Arkham loads the entire city into memory, but I doubt it.

Basically, if it was stuttering when you go to a new part of the city, then it could have been your drive. If it stuttered in the same place of Arkham, then it's something else, because you wouldn't be pulling data off the hdd in that instance.

I hope I was helpful.

Fact that the TC is not experiencing any more issues after installing the game onto another drive proves that its not the cpu/memory or the game. Something was going on the OS drive while playing and it could not handle all the load.

So your wrong about "There's no real difference between where your game is installed (2nd drive vs os drive)" Your pc performs more than one disk activity at once, and when you have alot of tasks in the background it can affect the performance of what your doing. Installing onto another drive allows the OS drive to do its functions and the game do its thing other another without bogging down the drives.

Yup. A faulty drive could be the cause. There's still negligible difference from installing on os drive or secondary drive. Sorry man. That's how it is. Tasks running in the os aren't constantly loading from hdd...they are running in system memory and were pulled off the hdd when they were loaded. That's just how things are, whether you accept it or not.

First, let's assume his perceived lag/stuttering was a change in fps, shall we. He wasn't online, so his stutter was a rapid change in fps one way or the other, rather than internet latency.

These boards are so fun...no matter what you say, there's always some guy that's sure he's got it licked. If the move from a faulty drive to a not faulty drive fixed his issue, great. It doesn't change the validity or soundness of my argument. CPU loads from HDD/ssd, then caches in memory for use until the program is closed because memory is much faster than hdd/ssd. If you'd like to prove me wrong, please post graphs/sources indicating that changing hdd changes perceived lag in games (read: quick changes in fps=lag). You won't be able to find it. CPU/ram/gpu are the only things that, if nothing is broken, will create anything to due with lag. Benchmarks for fps will be the same whether you are using the newest, fastest ssd, or a 5400 green hdd. Once data is cached for the program to load, hdd doesn't matter.

Also...you can't find any info on games being on a secondary hard drive performing any better than the os drive. Because it doesn't matter. The game is initially loaded into ram. When you change levels on some games, that load screen is there because the cpu is pulling data from hdd and caching it in ram, which is what you'd need to play.

Anyways...who cares. He probably had a faulty drive somehow, someway. Whether windows wasn't defragging, or he had bad sectors, or whatever.

So much misinformation, a faulty drive would be causing alot of issues. anything from bad sectors causing bsods, losing data etc, motor failure(noise to insanely slow boot ups and sluggish response), to platter/s failing losing massive amount of data and room.

It could have be heavily fragmented. The main drive could be lower rpm, and have less cache. the OS could have also had a lot things running bogging down the drive too. You can not tell anyone that you dont see improvements from having multiple drives..... Its no different from a raid having two drives accessing the data at the same time decreasing read/write times. Having a dedicated OS drive and dedicated drive for games and or storage will also improve access times. Having separate drives decreases the load each drive has to do.

"The hard drive's read head has to move to different positions to locate the different files every time you access data on your hard drive. This process takes just milliseconds, but it can add up when you're accessing thousands of files. Seek time contributes to the duration between the request to access the hard drive and when the hard drive actually starts reading or writing the data. A second hard drive won't cause the first hard drive to seek any faster, but it can play a role in dividing tasks. If you were to open a MP3 on one hard drive and run Windows Media Player on the other hard drive, both drives can perform the seek tasks to load the audio file and the program data simultaneously instead of one after the other.

Adding a second drive can improve your computer's ability to perform separate reading and writing tasks at the same time. Tasks that read and write a lot of data can max out a single hard drive's bandwidth. Computers rarely run just one program at a time and the different programs can slow each other down as the hard drive tries to accommodate read and write requests from multiple sources. For example, if you're exporting a half-hour-long video you just finished editing and decide to open Photoshop to work on another project in the interim, both tasks have to use the hard drive at the same time and will take longer to complete. With a second drive, you can export the video to one drive and load Photoshop from the other, which spreads the load so the two programs don't have to compete for the same hard drive bandwidth. The work division will improve the loading times for both tasks."

Since it's Unreal engine it loads textures every time which probably indicates that your HDD is wearing out.

Test it with http://crystalmark.info/software/CrystalDiskMark/index-e.html to check if your HDD is running at it's full speed.

@04dcarraher: @demi0227_basic is right about one thing: having games on the OS drive rarely improves performance.

as he said, programs on their startup are loaded into ram so that the HD is not used all the time while the program is running. on closing the program, it will be removed from RAM. large files like those of games or videos are moved in pieces as they are needed.

you can clearly see this for yourself because an idle pc will not have its HD LED lit. if you want to make sure you can open task manager and see the resource monitor to see how much and what programs are reading/writing from/to the HD.

the only time you would see a realistic performance gain (ie one that can be detected by humans) is if the OS drive reaches the saturation of read or write speed OR its connection with the rest of the pc. This never happens in PC games because they are designed to mitigate this problem by either loadscreens, when data is moved into the RAM, or limiting the amount of data required to be read from the HD during gameplay.

most likely reason in this case was high disk fragmentation or a failing HD.

1. games hardly do any writing of data
2. games cannot be spread onto multiple drives, even if they can be on a drive separate from the OS
3. because of 1. and 2. there's practically no load on the OS drive, thereby both leaving both drives with practically equal free bandwidth

the example you gave clearly states that for that particular user, he is running out of harddrive bandwidth because he is running both reading and writing operations, each of which would saturate the hardrive bandwidth individually.

@Chris_53: Stuttering can indeed be a sign of hard drive failure. I've had it happen to me twice. Try doing a check disk. You might have to set it so it checks when you reboot. Use google if you should need help.

Thanks for the replies guys. It might be worth me noticing that my HDD with my OS on is almost 3/4 full. Also, Windows dues seem to take a while to boot. Id say its around 10 minutes from switching on my PC to it being ready to use. Also when I say stuttering, I mean like quick freezing when moving around the city.

I guess you are the only person to play games while editing photos/movies. lol...

Sorry man...that's a long way to say "I'm full of nonsense." We, here in this thread, are talking about games. Playing games. On a computer. We aren't talking about editing anything while playing, nor are we talking about playing music while playing games. We are talking about playing games. 95% of games, the loading is done at the beginning of the game and loading of a level...during actual gameplay, you aren't using any hdd/ssd. Those only come into play during loads into memory.

I hope you get it, if not now than in the future.

please.......that was a quote, and playing games does eat into the drives resources....

There are plenty of games that stream data off the drive as you progress, Your being an troll, go try watchdogs, skyrim, and see what what happens as you play them the harddrive constantly is being used. Grabbing a dedicated drive can ease thrashing, hiccups speed up loading times too. Guess you never used raid before because going from raid to separate dedicated drives is a hell of alot better then running everything from one drive.

That is a quote..... but it is roughly correct.

1. games do alot of reading of data

2. what they mean is spread the workload that the OS and background items do on one drive and and the other tasks and things on another drive allowing the workload not to forced on all on one drive.

1. Only during loadscreens. During game play they do not read enough to saturate either the HD read speed or the SATA link.

2. OS does not do much reading of data from the HD after startup, and during game play it would probably do nothing at all.

Like I said, during game play just open up task manager and resource monitor from there, you would not see the much data being read from the drive. What is your pc's disk usage at idle? Mine sits at a comfortable 0%, or 0 kbps. During a game, the OS wouldn't need to be read at all, so whatever the disk usage is, it would be entirely because of the game. Therefore the game would have enough read speed and HD bandwidth usage available on either drive (100% in both cases).

If you open task manager during the game, then that would be an example of a piece of the OS being loaded from the HD, and task manager, like most OS programs, is tiny compared to any game.

1. False, it depends on the game's design there are plenty of games that stream data as you progress and it can eat the drives resources. skyrim being a prime example loading cells as you move. ID tech 5 engine based games are notorious for drive thrashing.

To actually saturate the port it does not happen while normal usage however between what you have running in the background and the game or whatever makes the drive do more which can lead to hiccups from constant hdd usage.

2. It all depends on what your running in the background, and the OS drive never runs at true 0%, system service always is doing something , as well with other processes. Its not all about usage, Queue length also plays a role in how well the drive performs.

Your harddrive's specs also plays a role in how well it can perform. low cache, low rpm does affect its ability, heavy fragmentation, A bogged down and junked up windows, alot of background items running. Having a dedicated drive does allow a more stable and smoother experience.

You initial claim is incorrect and you have been proven from other posters that you were wrong and I think you should simply just stop.

I run 2 ssd and I have the fastest loading amount people. Make sure one for just windows and other for application. Also run only intel sata on intel motherboard cause 3rd party sata is trash.

If need extra space go for just usb harddisk. I always dc usb harddisk cable(or anything with usb) unless needed cause it give extra latency which is no no for online gaming.

lol wrong.... they haven't proved anything.Its a fact running multiple drives lessens the load on the drives resources. And it all depends on what you have and is going on that determines if you see the differences.

background processes do not use HD all the time. i have mentioned this multiple times and you keep ignoring the fact. i can run an entire OS off an optical disk or USB 2.0 drive and nothing will lag because it's all in the ram. background processes are in the ram, that's why when you remove those same processes, ram is freed up. hell, you can eject the damn live disk and the OS will continue to run because it's. all. in. the. ram. yes, there will be background processes, and no, they are not reading anything off any disk.

granted, some games stream more off the HD than others, but if you haven't reached any saturation point it won't have an effect on game's performance. i know that skyrim and id tech 5 read a lot of data from the HD, but i don't know whether it reaches the read limit of the HD. for the same reason, regardless of whether you watch a 1gb or 1000gb video sitting on the hard drive, it will never stutter or lag, nor will there be any difference in the average disk usage because only that data is loaded which is necessary, NOT the entire file.

i know that having a dedicated drive is better, and that's not what i was talking about in any of my posts. i was talking about whether a slow, but functioning correctly, HD can cause game lag, and the answer is largely no (id tech 5 may be an exception).

you say that OS drive never runs at true 0%, true, because it rounded down since the true usage was under 0.5%. do you really think 0.5% of potential HD usage is able to cause noticeable lag?

There are definitely tons of games that read/write things from the harddrive mid-game (DayZ is an example, as well as the majority of open-world games), so thinking that games have no dependence on hard drives is completely incorrect. Very few people run minimalist OS setups, so it's very likely that unless you have zero background processes, your OS will be doing something in the background, even if it's just transferring things to and from the page file. Really, the OS is constantly reading and interacting with the hard drive (more often than not). Having the OS on a 2nd drive could potentially improve performance in some games because it creates less potential for the hard drive to get overly busy.

Some people are confusing stuttering caused by hard drive with FPS. Stuttering and FPS are mutually exclusive concepts in this scenario. You can have a high frame rate *and* stuttering. The stuttering would be caused by the hard drive being too busy and it can't read the information it needs to at the specific second it wants, creating moments of 0 FPS, dispersed among the 60 FPS play experienced. If you play DayZ on non-SSD, you should know exactly what I'm talking about.

Stuttering doesn't really come across in benchmarks well, so it's not incredibly easy to see the benefit in a benchmark scenario. A game could be stuttering significantly but the average FPS compared the non-stuttering game would only show up as a frame or two faster on average.

A moment of 0fps, then back to 60fps, is perceived as stuttering/lag. Therefore if a ssd/hdd is reading and the game freezes, or stutters, fps is effected. Period.

I don't think you quite understand what I wrote. A game can be stuttering in Scenario X a lot but the FPS average would be roughly the same as the non-stuttering game in Scenario Y. Stuttering often consists of pauses that are too short to have any significant impact on average FPS, so it wouldn't be easily measured synthetically.

You earlier stated that if having an OS on a separate drive improved game performance, there would be benchmarks proving so, but as I earlier typed, stuttering isn't something that always appears on benchmarks. The only thing you could measure is the lowest FPS and the instances they occur, but if you were to produce charts of a game's performance for comparison, there's not a ton of data you could say, other than that the minimum FPS was a little higher. Usually benchmarking yields a 1-2 FPS variation and stuttering could appear in the form of that variation (because like I just said, stuttering would not yield a huge effect on average FPS in a benchmark).

A real world example of what I'm talking about is if you're traversing to a new area in an open world game, if your OS happens to be doing something that particular instant, the game would stutter during that transition, but the average FPS during your the majority of your play time would be the same, because it's situationally dependent when this occurs.

My point? Just because having the OS on a separate drive doesn't improve a game's average FPS a noticeable amount doesn't necessarily mean that it doesn't improve the game's performance a noticeable amount. It's a situational thing. And if you're looking for a tangible performance boost, I wouldn't put any effort towards putting your OS on a separate drive unless it's convenient.

lol your not understanding that's the problem,It all depends on what your running in the background, harddrive's specs also plays a role in how well it can perform. low cache, low rpm does affect its ability, heavy fragmentation, A bogged down and junked up windows, alot of background items running. Going from a 5400 rpm 8/16mb cache to a 7200 rpm 32/64mb cache drive you will see big differences. and the fact that depending on what your OS is doing and how demanding the game caching is you can see a difference with a dedicated drive.

Can you show "that depending on what your OS is doing and how demanding the game caching is you can see a difference with a dedicated drive," or just make the claim?

I don't doubt what you are saying. I'm doubting that the perceived difference is noticeable. Just like going from 1600 to 2400 ram.

SSD can help on some stuttering in some types of games, but for the most part it just helps with loading times...

After that everything rests on the CPU/RAM/Video Card. You need everything to be fairly high end, if one part is lagging behind you won't get smooth gameplay. You don't use a shit cpu with a good video card, and the other way around also.