Do games lag because of hard drive?

Trying to figure out why some games lag, i changed the video card recently to gtx 570 and that told me that its not the card's fault because the previous one did the same thing. In games like crysis and mass effect 1 and maybe sc2, i get noticeable lag or pauses during intense battles or whatever for like one sec and then goes on like nothing happened. Crysis sometimes crashes but dont know if thats relevant.

It could either be bad RAM sticks or Hard drive, so what is it more likely to be the problem? Im leaning on hard drive because windows also sometimes lags, but only sometimes, and during that i see the red HD led lit on the case acting busy for no reason, this tells me that HD can pause the whole system even when i didnt do anything. Its as though its defragging or anti-virus scan but for like 5 sec and makes this loud vibrating hard disk sound (my case allows that normally coz of bad HD bay but its you only hear it when major HD activity)

Normally, a hard drive does not cause lag. You may get loading pauses or stutters when your game is auto saving. But general slowdowns are usually caused by not enough gpu, cpu, or ram.

Your issues are more likely ram than hard drive but can be something altogether different. Check your drive for smart errors and perform a thorough scan disk and follow up with virus malware scan. If nothing comes up, it is prolly not the hard drive. Then run memtest overnoght to see if the ram is good or not.

The last game I played/heard of that regularly encountered that kind of "lag" was Half Life 2. There was a weird sound bug that would load massive (at the time of release, of course) amounts of sound files at a time, which would make the audio hitch or stutter. There was also a second bug that would load huge amounts of textures the instant you turned a corner, which would absolutely kill framerate while the audio skipped for several seconds. Not all machines were affected, but on those that were it appeared to be a game engine limitation rather than a resources one (in other words, beefing up the system wouldn't make the issue much better; some weak machines would be fine while a high-end one would regularly encounter the issue.)

Very rarely, I encountered these same bugs in Left 4 Dead as well. I'm guessing Source handles/handled loading assets strangely. But I haven't run into those kinds of issues at all recently.

You may want to invest in a new hard drive. Your sig says you're running off a Green 1TB drive; you could move up to a much more performance-oriented 1TB drive for relatively little money now. Of course overall I'd recommend saving up for an SSD, but since I'm waiting for 256GB drives to drop below $300 myself I'm not sure I'd take my own advice yet.

Games usually load all the data they need for a level in ram. Assuming there is enough ram, then it shouldn't be paging the hard drive in between level loading. Exceptions are situations where the user doesn't have enough ram, or sandbox style games where you are constantly accessing file archives or simply using a crap ton of ram.

Some games are different though, so the above doesn't always apply. If games are crashing and you are getting erratic behavior within windows, then perhaps you have a hardware fault? Run mem-test and download crystal disk info to get a look at the Smart data off your drive.

Something to also keep in mind is that most anti-cheat programs built into the games (Especially punk buster) can also be a source of lag and may not be your machine at all

Almost all hard drive activity by the game is when you load a level/zone/whatever. There is very minimal if any loading or HD access during a level. Unless of course you count background services other than the game fondling the HD for some reason.

Bad ConNecTioN said:

Games usually load all the data they need for a level in ram. Assuming there is enough ram, then it shouldn't be paging the hard drive in between level loading. Exceptions are situations where the user doesn't have enough ram, or sandbox style games where you are constantly accessing file archives or simply using a crap ton of ram.

Some games are different though, so the above doesn't always apply. If games are crashing and you are getting erratic behavior within windows, then perhaps you have a hardware fault? Run mem-test and download crystal disk info to get a look at the Smart data off your drive.

Click to expand...

***If designed for a PC primarily in mind, the first paragraph is true***. IE: Games like Crysis, Metro 2003, etc. Keep in mnd, a lot of console developers first, pc-port later style companies come up with very creative solutions regarding streaming data from your 'disc' // 'hd' because when they initially make games for a console, they are dealing with a memory limitation of 256mb for the cpu/system(before operating system overhead) and 256mb for the graphics card.

In addition, the read-speeds on an xbox 360's 8xDVD-rom drive or ps3's 1xblu-ray drive pale in comparison to the throughput of an actual hard drive.

So a combined total of 512mb that is somewhat shareable between the two. Albiet, more shareable on the xbox 360 due to shared memory aritechture than the ps3 which is possible but requires a workaround at some performance loss. The assumption that everything is loaded into ram, on a colsole, would be fairly absurd when you consider 512mb of ram versus a 7GBish dual layer dvd-disc. Unless you were purposely trying to limit your game to look like an n64 or gamecube game albiet running really fast/smoothly!

Smart data is fine, Illl defrag and do extensive tests later, as for RAM, can I use windows memory diagnostic instead? and how long should i leave it for?

Its important to note that Firefox also exhibits the same problem with the HD being busy, sometimes it hangs and HD makes vibration noises for like 5 sec.

I know most wide- open MMO's will lag slightly with slow harddisks. One way to avoid the stutters and lag in a games loading is to exceed 4 gigs of ram. A good well coded game today could easily take up 2 gigs a memory.

guys i got 6 gigs of "value" ram and the game is not at a checkpoint or saving or anything, its only during intense battles. like when too many things are happening. Maybe HD is loading stuff to RAM during the game even during battles?

You have enough ram and then some for most any modern game I can think of, your settings may be too high for your gpu or cpu to play smoothly when there is a lot going on in game.

settings make no difference, it even happens to mass effect 1. I first made a thread about it in RAM forums but they said "pauses" is not a symptom of bad ram.

Try to install and run HD Tune and see how your primary disk performs. How fast is your Net btw, down wise?

dioxholster said:

settings make no difference, it even happens to mass effect 1. I first made a thread about it in RAM forums but they said "pauses" is not a symptom of bad ram.

Click to expand...

Do you have a Logitech mouse? Setpoint has been know to cause low fps in some games. If you do, try disabling or uninstalling Setpoint temporarily and see if that is the issue.

you need to watch the intel presentation "Solid-State Drive (SSD) Impacts on the Run-Time Performance of A-List Games" in order to really understand the impact of storage to gaming. there is much more to it than people think, they have game developers who explain it very well. it doeas have a big impact btw, but probably not what your having probs with.

http://intelstudios.edgesuite.net/idf/2010/sf/aep/SSDS004/SSDS004.html

I got a logitech mouse with setpoint enabled, dont know about fps, im not sure if its that, its more of a complete pause and continues as though nothing happened. SSD is probably better performance wise ut not sure why normal HD would do that.

sounds to me like it might be the green drive. they are notorious for the headparking issues and are very slow to wake up...which would cause your lag. imo i wouldnt use a green drive as a primary/secondary drive in any sytem thats used for gaming.

The green drive is probably the culprit but i thought HD only affect the "loading" of games and not actual gameplay?

Use the WIN 7 Resource Monitor inside the Task Manager and watch both your page file and disk activity. See if increased activity there coincides with your lag spikes.

Mike Clements said:

Use the WIN 7 Resource Monitor inside the Task Manager and watch both your page file and disk activity. See if increased activity there coincides with your lag spikes.

Click to expand...

can I do that during a game?

Yes. You can do it either with dual monitors if you have them or use windowed mode.

jup. I read your post, suspected, then read your hardware and confirmed. The green drives are for shit. They park their heads frequently at random times. they ignore the windows head park settings. I had the same issue when browsing. Complete freeze for 30 seconds. Replace os, same. replace drive. fixed. There is some sort of problem with the firmware on them. get something that reads the smart data and look at the numbers.

Rogue71 said:

sounds to me like it might be the green drive. they are notorious for the headparking issues and are very slow to wake up...which would cause your lag. imo i wouldnt use a green drive as a primary/secondary drive in any sytem thats used for gaming.

Click to expand...

Im using three drives, you telling me the green drive cant be even used as secondary? why?

Mike Clements said:

Yes. You can do it either with dual monitors if you have them or use windowed mode.

Click to expand...

I will do it in windowed mode then.