Hard Drive failure or problem with game?

[Iggy Wolf]

So I noticed when recently playing Metro Redux 2033 that the game would sometimes have the FPS slightly dip before a save. Then I noticed some enemies scripts break and they just stay still in one spot. I've also had issues in the past with the computer freezing up or lagging heavily even on desktop while my antivirus would update because it would run the disk usage to 100%.

I remember when my externall HDD for my Xbox One was failing that during gameplay in RDR2, characters' scripts would break, Arthur wouldn't climb horses or craft anything because the action would be delayed or wouldn't work at all, and sometimes the map wouldn't even load. I don't know if it's similar on PC when playing games but is it possible the same thing is happening with my current hard drive, and would cloning/backing it up onto a different and new one save my data?

[emoticorpse]

have you run malwarebytes? you try installing the game onto an ssd to test whether it's more stable?

if you backup the stuff to good drive then yeah, it can save your stuff if your current hdd craps out on you

[Bad 💀 Motha]

This totally sounds like Thermal Throttling, especially for the CPU, which explains why the AI starts doing odd stuff or just losing you or standing still, etc.

Antivirus shouldn't be running when gaming, period.
Turn it off, pause it. Also you should add things like Steam and Game Library to the AV suites exception listing since all that will do is scan those areas everytime you run a game client or game. Set scanning to low priority mode to use less CPU/RAM/Disk usages.

Have OS and Games on SSDs, not a HDD.

But just run diagnostics on your RAM and any storage drives you have.

[Iggy Wolf]

Messaggio originale di Bad 💀 Motha:

This totally sounds like Thermal Throttling, especially for the CPU, which explains why the AI starts doing odd stuff or just losing you or standing still, etc.

Antivirus shouldn't be running when gaming, period.
Turn it off, pause it. Also you should add things like Steam and Game Library to the AV suites exception listing since all that will do is scan those areas everytime you run a game client or game. Set scanning to low priority mode to use less CPU/RAM/Disk usages.

Have OS and Games on SSDs, not a HDD.

But just run diagnostics on your RAM and any storage drives you have.

It's not throttling anything to be honest. The antivirus isn't scanning anything when I game. The freezes I had before were while I was on DESKTOP. Not even in any game. And I don't have the luxury of an SSD. I know they're better for loading times but doesn't mean HDDs are suddenly always bad while SSDs are always good and cannot fail. I was thinking of running CHKDISK though for my D partition.

[emoticorpse]

Messaggio originale di Iggy Wolf:

Messaggio originale di Bad 💀 Motha:

This totally sounds like Thermal Throttling, especially for the CPU, which explains why the AI starts doing odd stuff or just losing you or standing still, etc.

Antivirus shouldn't be running when gaming, period.
Turn it off, pause it. Also you should add things like Steam and Game Library to the AV suites exception listing since all that will do is scan those areas everytime you run a game client or game. Set scanning to low priority mode to use less CPU/RAM/Disk usages.

Have OS and Games on SSDs, not a HDD.

But just run diagnostics on your RAM and any storage drives you have.

It's not throttling anything to be honest. The antivirus isn't scanning anything when I game. The freezes I had before were while I was on DESKTOP. Not even in any game. And I don't have the luxury of an SSD. I know they're better for loading times but doesn't mean HDDs are suddenly always bad while SSDs are always good and cannot fail. I was thinking of running CHKDISK though for my D partition.

if the freezes happen while on desktop and it's consistent try booting off a portable Linux or something and seeing if it still acts funky. What does s.m.a.r.t. say about the drive?

[Iggy Wolf]

Messaggio originale di emoticorpse:

Messaggio originale di Iggy Wolf:

It's not throttling anything to be honest. The antivirus isn't scanning anything when I game. The freezes I had before were while I was on DESKTOP. Not even in any game. And I don't have the luxury of an SSD. I know they're better for loading times but doesn't mean HDDs are suddenly always bad while SSDs are always good and cannot fail. I was thinking of running CHKDISK though for my D partition.

if the freezes happen while on desktop and it's consistent try booting off a portable Linux or something and seeing if it still acts funky. What does s.m.a.r.t. say about the drive?

Haven't tried running SMART yet. Will probably do that.

[_I_]

smart is not something you 'run'

you can see the smart data on each drive with aida64 or crystaldiskinfo
which can tell you if a drive is going bad or failing

any bad, pending, or re-allocated sectors means the drive is bad and should be replaced asap

[Bad 💀 Motha]

Check Drive Health via CrystalDiskInfo app.

Check each drive partition for bad sectors. To do this much more easily, bring up Windows Explorer > This PC > right click drive letter > go to Properties > Tools > click Error Checking, if any boxes to click, click those so they are checked. Then click OK. Do all the drives except for C Drive. Save doing it on C Drive for last, as this will require you to Restart Windows so it can do the scan since it can't scan properly while the OS is running.

I understand not everything can afford to replace all internal drives with SSDs, but at the very least your OS should be installed to an SSD, otherwise that PC is always only ever going to be slow, no matter what you do or how you configure it.

[Iggy Wolf]

Messaggio originale di Bad 💀 Motha:

Check Drive Health via CrystalDiskInfo app.

Check each drive partition for bad sectors. To do this much more easily, bring up Windows Explorer > This PC > right click drive letter > go to Properties > Tools > click Error Checking, if any boxes to click, click those so they are checked. Then click OK. Do all the drives except for C Drive. Save doing it on C Drive for last, as this will require you to Restart Windows so it can do the scan since it can't scan properly while the OS is running.

I understand not everything can afford to replace all internal drives with SSDs, but at the very least your OS should be installed to an SSD, otherwise that PC is always only ever going to be slow, no matter what you do or how you configure it.

It's not slow per say. Like I said, I don't mind having it on an HDD. The "slowing down" was due to disk usage being 100% due to the antivirus doing an update WHILE a game on Steam was downloading. Naturally, the hard drive got overwhelmed.

[Bad 💀 Motha]

Messaggio originale di Iggy Wolf:

Messaggio originale di Bad 💀 Motha:

Check Drive Health via CrystalDiskInfo app.

Check each drive partition for bad sectors. To do this much more easily, bring up Windows Explorer > This PC > right click drive letter > go to Properties > Tools > click Error Checking, if any boxes to click, click those so they are checked. Then click OK. Do all the drives except for C Drive. Save doing it on C Drive for last, as this will require you to Restart Windows so it can do the scan since it can't scan properly while the OS is running.

I understand not everything can afford to replace all internal drives with SSDs, but at the very least your OS should be installed to an SSD, otherwise that PC is always only ever going to be slow, no matter what you do or how you configure it.

It's not slow per say. Like I said, I don't mind having it on an HDD. The "slowing down" was due to disk usage being 100% due to the antivirus doing an update WHILE a game on Steam was downloading. Naturally, the hard drive got overwhelmed.

This is exactly why running OS + Game Clients from an SSD is a must. A HDD can not multi-task. For an SSD it won't even break a sweat doing what you say was bogging down your Disk Usage and thus your entire PC. If the OS is on ANY HDD type and not an SSD, soon as the HDD is worked hard enough, the entire PC pretty much becomes unresponsive until those tasks the HDD is doing are done. You would not get anywhere near the same issues if OS + Apps (like Game Clients) were all on an SSD. The HDD can be a secondary storage, and you can have game libraries on any of those drives as well. It wont bring the whole PC to its knees to have games download to a secondary HDD if the OS + game clients are on an SSD. SSDs are not expensive and you don't need a $100+ 1TB drive in order to house OS + Apps. You can easily make do with a 250GB SSD to house OS + Apps. Loose files and games can go onto the HDD.

[Iggy Wolf]

Messaggio originale di Bad 💀 Motha:

Messaggio originale di Iggy Wolf:

It's not slow per say. Like I said, I don't mind having it on an HDD. The "slowing down" was due to disk usage being 100% due to the antivirus doing an update WHILE a game on Steam was downloading. Naturally, the hard drive got overwhelmed.

This is exactly why running OS + Game Clients from an SSD is a must. A HDD can not multi-task. For an SSD it won't even break a sweat doing what you say was bogging down your Disk Usage and thus your entire PC. If the OS is on ANY HDD type and not an SSD, soon as the HDD is worked hard enough, the entire PC pretty much becomes unresponsive until those tasks the HDD is doing are done. You would not get anywhere near the same issues if OS + Apps (like Game Clients) were all on an SSD. The HDD can be a secondary storage, and you can have game libraries on any of those drives as well. It wont bring the whole PC to its knees to have games download to a secondary HDD if the OS + game clients are on an SSD. SSDs are not expensive and you don't need a $100+ 1TB drive in order to house OS + Apps. You can easily make do with a 250GB SSD to house OS + Apps. Loose files and games can go onto the HDD.

That's fair enough but I wasn't asking for advice on whether I should get an SSD or HDD. Simply whether my HDD was failing or not. At that point, an SSD would be IRRELEVANT. Because my game data is STILL on an HDD. There's plenty of topics I imagine on the pros/cons of an SSD vs HDD, but THIS was NOT one of those. So while I appreciate the "advice", it is useless for my current situation.

[Bad 💀 Motha]

Failing is simple to find out.
CrystalDiskInfo and CHKDSK as already explained.
Again though, your PC is acting this way because well all HDDs are dirt slow. They can't multi-task. When you have Steam downloading a game, you should do it while you sleep or when its ok for you to walk away from the PC. Cause you're not going to be able to do other stuff while it is doing that. There are maybe two ways to get around that; apply a bandwidth limit in Steam, and/or use an SSD.

[Iggy Wolf]

Messaggio originale di Bad 💀 Motha:

Failing is simple to find out.
CrystalDiskInfo and CHKDSK as already explained.
Again though, your PC is acting this way because well all HDDs are dirt slow. They can't multi-task. When you have Steam downloading a game, you should do it while you sleep or when its ok for you to walk away from the PC. Cause you're not going to be able to do other stuff while it is doing that. There are maybe two ways to get around that; apply a bandwidth limit in Steam, and/or use an SSD.

That was actually HOPEFUL for me, cause at least it would indicate that at worst, my computer simply slows to a crawl when the HDD is overwhelmed, and NOT because it's failing. My current HDD only has 317 GB left on the D Partition and 42 GB left on the C partition. It's a 3 TB drive though. But I suppose if I were to get an SSD/HDD combo, I would do so for a new computer anyway, as my current one's CPU and motherboard is now outdated by 6 years anyway. And Microsoft intends to release Windows 11, so would be a good excuse to get a new PC anyway. At least, when GPU prices stabilize and parts are easier to get a hold of again.

[Bad 💀 Motha]

The only free space that really matters in terms of becoming a real problem is free space on C Drive, which when using Win10, the C Drive should have no less then approx 40GB free space as this is needed over time to do Windows Updates, especially when applying a Feature Update as this needs enough space to make an entire copy of the whole OS.

Some simple ways to free up some more space on C Drive...
> Disk Cleanup (Run As Admin)
^ Select all boxes except for the "Downloads" box as this pertains to the User Downloads folder.

> Disable of Hibernation
^ If you have lets say 16GB installed RAM, Hibernation's temp file will by default take up approx 12GB of disk space on C Drive, whether you use this or not. To easily disable it and free up space, launch CMD (via Run As Admin option) and type POWERCFG -H OFF and then press Enter key, then Restart Windows.

> System Restore
^ Set this manually to around 20GB. You could set it smaller, but if you do it will take much more time to make system restore points, as a higher compression rate is used so the OS can keep system restore points over time within this max size you have set. System restore points are made manually by Windows OS anytime you install or uninstall things. Every 1-3 months of having a stable running system, its a good idea to take the time to wipe all the system restore points, then once done, manually create one of your own so you will have at least one to fall back on if need be.

Setting Web Browsers to Download any loose files to another Drive or Partition is also a good idea to keep those off of C Drive.

[_I_]

free space is not a sign of failing
check the smart table with crystaldiskinfo

if its a 5400rpm or slower hdd or even a 2.5in hdd it will be slow as dirt compared to a 7200rpm 3.5in hdd

those slow drives were not ment for normal use, backups and low disk activity tasks, or video surveillance (large slow serial read/write)