Quick Freeze/Lag?loading issue : Solved (External HDD speeds)

[Jazz_lePhoonks]

Hey everyone, for quite some time now I've been having some issues with pretty well all of my steam games freezing or lagging for about one full second before going back to normal. I had checked all of my internet connections and port settings etc. only to come up without an answer any time.

This would happen with any game regardless of graphic needs or CPU usage. I tried getting some answers from steam support but was only eveer told that the problem was likely in my port settings, which I knew to be false. I knew this because of two reasons: All of my offline games would still have the exact same freeze/lag issue. All of my NON-STEAM games work 100% such as Starcraft and DIablo which cannot even be played without an internet connection. Considering these factors I realised the issue was not likely in my internet settings.

After a long while of experimenting I noticed that the only games on Steam that did not freeze or lag were Skyrim and Morrowind. I spent some time trying to understand why the two games that have the biggest package of mods and changes to the INI files etc. were the only games running smoothly without freezes, and i came down to this conclusion. Steam had problems with both Skyrim and Morrowind when i tried to move them to my External Drive so i just left them on the C drive as I didn't want to take the time to figure out the issue and then re-install all the mods. All of my other games are installed on the external drive which is connected through USB.

The External Drive connected through USB simply isn't fast enough to load all the info the ram/GPU/CPU are asking for and so it lags/freezes while loading many effects and so on. I originally had my external running from a USB 2.0 port, and found out that generally USB 2.0 speed doesn't do it. I was told that USB 3.0 speeds would be fine for performance but in my own experience the 3.0 ports were still not quick enough, though this may be my own problem as i did notice my 3.0 port shorting out and causing problems with a wirless internet stick previously.

Anyways I hope this helps clear up an issue I've heard some people having. If you just can't figure out why things aren't running smoothly and you've been using an external source for your installs, try using the C:drive, or another drive connected by SATA. An SSD external hard drive should have no issues with speed at all either.

This has been tested for me with the games Terraria and Fallout 3. both of these games so far have stopped the freeze/lag glitch, and I was even able to move Fallout 3 without losing any mods or save files despite it not being synced with the cloud.

[Vienna]

garrys mod lags on external hard drives also

[ReBoot]

Yup, external drives suck for gaming. Not always, professional external storage solutions that are fast enough for video cutting are sure as hell fast enough for gaming, but your run-off-the-mill-consumer-grade external storage solutions suck for gaming. Period.

[Jazz_lePhoonks]

It's been a while since I posted this and I haven't tried going back to an external drive for gaming but I have since thought about how the USB/HDD settings may have been the culprit. It is potentially possible that my PC was trying to put my external drive to sleep or that the USB settings for power management were turning of that particular USB port after x amount of time. Regardless, using an SSD is definitely the way to go for gaming. These days you can get a fair sized one for a decent price and just use externals to store media files and such things, keeping your SSD free for games and OS.