BF4 spinning up file storage/secondary drives

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WinSomeLoseNone

Gawd
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Dec 22, 2007
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Anyone else experiencing this issue with BF4?

I have my OS and all programs on a 250GB SSD. I also have two 1TB drives which exclusively house backup data like photos, video, etc. I only access the backup on rare occasions and as a result have set the drive to turn off after 5 minutes of inactivity. Prior to installing BF4 the backup drives would only spin up when I accessed them as expected.

Every time I launch BF4, change maps, or exit the game, it freezes for a moment while both of my file storage drives are spun up in succession. Once the drives are spinning loading will continue, or if I was quitting the application will close.

Just to make sure the drives were not being used I disconnected them and booted up with just the SSD. As expected BF4 launched just fine and there was no pause. Loading time between maps was faster and exiting was instant.

So the real question is, why the hell does BF4 spin up drives that are not being utilized at all for the Application?

It's driving me nuts and I'm leaving the backup drives disconnected for now.
 
No need to worry, they just replicate your information on the National Sports Academy servers for backup. With competitive gaming being recognized as a sport, what I just said makes some sense.
 
dgz said:
No need to worry, they just replicate your information on the National Sports Academy servers for backup. With competitive gaming being recognized as a sport, what I just said makes some sense.
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You mean I'm getting access to a free cloud-based backup? Sounds like a deal to me!


Really though, why the hell does the application need to access all my drives. I could connect 8 HDDs and every one would be spun up by BF4. WTF?!?!
 
DICE Coding Magic AKA We don't have a damn clue what we're doing but we know you like it to be really pretty ;-D
 
Load up Resource Monitor (start menu/assessories/system tools)

Click the Disk tab at the top. Click bf4.exe under the "Processes with Disk Activity" (or whatever it is, I don't have the game so it may be named differently)

Then look at the "Disk Activity" in the next section below and you'll see what it's accessing.

If it's snooping through your files you can tell, or if it's writing out a temp file for it's shaders or who knows what, then you'll be able to tell by the file name listed.
 
Scoobydo said:
Load up Resource Monitor (start menu/assessories/system tools)

Click the Disk tab at the top. Click bf4.exe under the "Processes with Disk Activity" (or whatever it is, I don't have the game so it may be named differently)

Then look at the "Disk Activity" in the next section below and you'll see what it's accessing.

If it's snooping through your files you can tell, or if it's writing out a temp file for it's shaders or who knows what, then you'll be able to tell by the file name listed.
Click to expand...

Will check tonight, thanks.

Some googling suggests that it might be related to Punkbuster.
 
Could change power down to something like 20 or 30 minutes until this is resolved.
 
Yes I get this too. Usually it starts happening after a certain amount of time I start noticing increased disk activity. I think I checked on it once and it seemed like punkbuster. No other game does it. It is pretty annoying.
 
bigdogchris said:
Could change power down to something like 20 or 30 minutes until this is resolved.
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If it gets resolved. It might be a "feature" associated with punkbuster.

kuhla said:
Yes I get this too. Usually it starts happening after a certain amount of time I start noticing increased disk activity. I think I checked on it once and it seemed like punkbuster. No other game does it. It is pretty annoying.
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It's annoying when your PC is on your desk (because it is so sexy) and running completely silent until your HDDs spin up and become the loudest component. After switching to SSDs I immediately notice the ever so subtle vibration in my desk from the HDDs spinning.
 
Run procmon.exe http://live.sysinternals.com/ and start a scan right before running BF4. Capture the occurance, immediately stop your scan. Scour through for some disk reads etc.. when you find them, create filter to only show like entries then track it down to the process level.

Ultimately though, the game or punkbuster may be written to check all drives for something before launching, which sucks for those of us who have slower SATA for storage. It happens to me, but then again I installed BF4 on my SATA, the only things that run on SSD are my OS and my video/photo editing software. Nothing else (games included) really have high enough I/O for sustained read/write times to be an issue. Nothing wrong with writing to SSD, you will get better performance so long as you have ample room on the disk. SSD performs poorly when loaded full'ish, I get better performance offloading most games to SATA instead of loading my SSDs full.
 
theNoid said:
Run procmon.exe http://live.sysinternals.com/ and start a scan right before running BF4. Capture the occurance, immediately stop your scan. Scour through for some disk reads etc.. when you find them, create filter to only show like entries then track it down to the process level.

Ultimately though, the game or punkbuster may be written to check all drives for something before launching, which sucks for those of us who have slower SATA for storage. It happens to me, but then again I installed BF4 on my SATA, the only things that run on SSD are my OS and my video/photo editing software. Nothing else (games included) really have high enough I/O for sustained read/write times to be an issue. Nothing wrong with writing to SSD, you will get better performance so long as you have ample room on the disk. SSD performs poorly when loaded full'ish, I get better performance offloading most games to SATA instead of loading my SSDs full.
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Thanks for the tip.

SSD is only 50% full. 20% free space minimum is recommended for SSDs.

I use the SSD for BF4 because the load times are <15 seconds compared to over a minute on the HDDs
 
not a "why" but if its just for backups you could try and mount them in as a directory point instead of a drive letter.. punkbuster or bf4 is probably doing an enumeration check.. it may even be Windows 7 is BF4 is accessing the files is an unusually way (in that the OS has to enumerate the drives before loading).

mounting the drive as say

C:\Backup instead of D: may be a work around.
 
ZaC851 said:
are you using shadowplay and have it to record to that drive?
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Was going to ask same. Shadowplay spins up the secondary drive I have connected (and configured for Shadowplay to save to it), and if I disable Shadowplay the drive stays spun down.

Also go into Origin -> Application Settings -> uncheck "Cloud Storage" because its worthless, certainly not needed to play Multiplayer BF4.

Punkbuster doesn't spin up all drives, if it did I'd see my secondary drive constantly spin up when joining MP servers.
 
DPI said:
Was going to ask same. Shadowplay spins up the secondary drive I have connected (and configured for Shadowplay to save to it), and if I disable Shadowplay the drive stays spun down.

Also go into Origin -> Application Settings -> uncheck "Cloud Storage" because its worthless, certainly not needed to play Multiplayer BF4.

Punkbuster doesn't spin up all drives, if it did I'd see my secondary drive constantly spin up when joining MP servers.
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Not using shadowplay; it's not even installed unless it comes with the drivers.

If you drive is mounted as a standard storage device similar to mine is makes no sense that your drives would not spin up when launching BF4. Are you sure the drives are turned off/idle when launching BF4?

Good point on the Cloud Storage though I doubt it's related.

H-street said:
not a "why" but if its just for backups you could try and mount them in as a directory point instead of a drive letter.. punkbuster or bf4 is probably doing an enumeration check.. it may even be Windows 7 is BF4 is accessing the files is an unusually way (in that the OS has to enumerate the drives before loading).

mounting the drive as say

C:\Backup instead of D: may be a work around.
Click to expand...
Never considered this. I'm curious to see if the drive is still accessed when mounted as a directory point.
 
Yes, I can launch BF4 and play a round while secondary stays spun down. SSD is my primary.

Question: Do you have any other Origin games installed to your secondary drive(s)? Because when launching BF4 it hooks Origin and makes sure its running.
 
DPI said:
Yes, I can launch BF4 and play a round while secondary stays spun down. SSD is my primary.

Question: Do you have any other Origin games installed to your secondary drive(s)? Because when launching BF4 it hooks Origin and makes sure its running.
Click to expand...

I have no applications on the secondary drive.

Looks like I'll just leave them disconnected for now.. Or maybe I'll unmount/mount as needed to keep them from being spun-up.
 
What's odd is I noticed BF3 use to do this, even though no BF3 files were on the secondary drive. Never found out the reason. Fortunately for me it didn't really impact loading times.
 
I have storage drive as well and have noticed that several programs will spin it up even though I'm not acessing the drive or paging to it.
 
chameleoneel said:
I have storage drive as well and have noticed that several programs will spin it up even though I'm not acessing the drive or paging to it.
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I have only noticed with BF3 and BF4. It's not really a big deal, but the pause/freeze for about 3-5 seconds every time I have to load a map or exit the game is driving me nuts.
 
my guess is that programs don't actually "know" what your page file settings are. so when it needs to page, it just makes a generic call to spin up all drives and then tells windows to start paging data. that is a wild guess.
 
My drives often spin up from various programs, it's annoying because it takes several seconds to do it, why use an SSD to gain a fraction of second when your data HDDs take significantly longer to spin up and random times?

I might try mounting them as directories.
 
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