Slow Reads When Writing

P

PiERiT

2[H]4U
Joined
Oct 8, 2010
Messages
2,601
I posted something similar to this a couple years ago and never figured out a resolution, so here's trying again!

Let's say my computer is writing to the hard drive at its max write speed, extracting a file for example, and it's also reading from it, playing a video for example. When both of these occur at the same time, the video playback is very choppy. It clears up immediately as soon as the writing is done, so it's as if my drive can't handle writing and reading at the same time. I can 'fix' this by disabling Write Caching within Windows, but then write speeds slow down considerably, so it's not really a fix.

Shy of using SSDs for storage, is there anything I can do? Would a RAID level fix this? Or a hybrid drive? Or some Windows or BIOS setting? It's persisted through two different hard drives and two different motherboards, so I assume it's a common thing that most people don't really notice or don't care about.

Any suggestions are appreciated.
 
You could use different drives for the different tasks, say a video drive and another gaming drive. You can only expect so much from a mechanical drive's resources, it has a maximum, and it sounds like you might be expecting too much. If it's an older drive, updating to a newer drive might help, as drives have become faster over the years.
 
youre asking to much of a regular mech hdd. the read head will have to move too much for what you are attempting. get a ssd or a separate drive to keep your movies on and you wont have this prob any more.
 
Sounds like typical HDD contention. Either the video player should buffer more or the writing program should throttle back a bit. There might also be I/O priorities you can set to give the video player preference over background tasks.
 
As others have said, a hdd is not going to be able to handle that due to it being a mechanical drive.

Either switch to multiple drives or, better yet, to SSDs.
 
As mentioned before. The drive is telling you its at its limits. I suggest, as you said you would like an option other than ssd, is to run separate drives for extracting and videos.
 
This is the limitation of having storage on a single drive. Generally though it's a good practice to have your storage on a drive or drives and your OS on another. That way you reduce the amount of resource contention.
 
Hmm, my video player actually had a setting for priority, and changing it to Realtime seems to have fixed this. If I find that doesn't work in some scenarios I'll look at adding a second drive or maybe a cheap NAS. Thanks guys.

Edit: Actually that only works some times and not others for no apparent reason. Oh well. Time for another hard drive I guess.
 
Last edited:
You could also use an SSD for your extraction.

SSDs are more reliable than HDDs, there is no reason to avoid them.

My main computer has a 1TB SSD as the C drive and I do everything on it, at the same time. Extracting a blu-ray from RARs while playing another blu-ray and hashing a third one, 3 browsers opened with hundreds of tabs, RDP to 3 computers, triple screens. Computers with the OS on hard drives are a nightmare.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top