Here's some background about my issue. I have Windows installed on an SSD, but most of my games are on my secondary storage device, an HDD. Every so often in only a few games (Mainly AC3 and Shadow of Mordor), usually during cutscenes especially in Shadow of Mordor, it will freeze everything for about 5 seconds while continuing to play the audio (wherever the audio left off.)
Then, after that, during live gameplay it will do the same thing. I can't quite figure out why, and here's what I've done so far:
- My paging file was off. I have since turned it on, both drives, but allocated more to the HDD (about 5GB.) The SDD has about 1GB. This didn't fix my problem.
- I have a gaming laptop with two GTX 980 (not M) graphics cards in SLI. Perhaps SLI is causing these freezes?
- In power management, I turned off "turn off HDD after a certain time to conserve power." No luck here either.
I'm out of ideas here. I would move the games to my SSD, but I have uninstalled them because frankly I was annoyed. If it helps, I stored some music on my HDD and the same thing happened. I'd play it, but then they'd freeze for a while and pick up. Perhaps my HDD is damaged in some way? That would be a bummer because this is a brand new laptop.
Best Answer
It could be due to several things:
It might be that your HDD is "getting old", if it makes a lot of noise while this is happening consider getting a new one. Run a test to see if its very defragmented and to check that the sectors and the overall disc is OK.
Secondly keep in mind that you are reading from a HDD and some information sometimes is "moved" to the the SSD and viceversa, so ofcourse its going to be slow since the HDD reads/writes slower than the SSD and therefore you have a neck bottle situation when doing this (fast -> slow OR slow -> fast).
From my experience trying to run games from my external HDD is not very pleasant, specially with newer games like, for example, the Elder Scrolls Online, I had spikes on videos and very bad fps while it could basically run great on the SSD.
I'm pretty sure it would run much better on a external SSD using a USB 3.0 but... yeah if you cannot / don't want to get one It is what you gotta live with. Just try to make a balance between what "works fine" with the external (HDD) and move what "works bad" on the internal (SSD).