I bought a few games recently and I have installed them on my external HDD. However when I play them I encounter random freezing for about 3 seconds but then its fine for 10 seconds and it just keeps repeating this. The PC tempuratures are fine all below 50 degrees. What could it be? Could it be the external HDD?
Mat
Could it be the external HDD?
It could be the hard drive. You can validate this by using the local hard drive and seeing if there is a difference.
keep in mind that your secondary storage is the slowest component in your system. If on top of that, you have some type of congestion problem moving data to and from an external drive, it could cause an issue for a process demanding data faster than the drive can send it.
I shall transfer a game over and see how that goes, if it doesn't work I shall reply back.
You can also try other things like turning off hardware acceleration on your video card. Maybe try that first before since that's an easy setting to check.
Right, I tried a game pre-installed and that ran perfectly fine with a constant 50 - 55 fps. I am copying over the smallest of the games freezing to see if it works, currently on 58%.
SATA2 hard drives have a maximum data transfer rate of 300mbps while USB2 has a maximum data transfer rate of 150mbps. A USB2 external is only ever going to be half the speed of an internal drive. USB3 on the other hand has a maximum transfer rate of 300mbps but you need a USB3 external plugged into a USB3 socket to get full speed, USB3 ports are usually coloured blue.
I wouldn't recommend running games from an external. Externals have no active cooling in general so running games that demand lots of disk access is going to cause the external to overheat and die.
I work in a computer shop and we come across overheated externals on a daily basis. 9 times out of 10 it's the hard drive that suffers from failure and when that happens the only cure is to replace the hard drive.
Ok, thank you. I have run out of hard drive bays in my case:( But I am buying a full sized case soon so I won't have a need for the external HDD:)
So how did your tests go? Did you reproduce or solve the issue?
Yeah, it was the external HDD however I think the problems was caused by:
A pin bent on the power adapter so I had to bend it back, I don't know if it's losing power
The USB 2.0 cable connecting the HDD and PC is too slow
Thanks for your help :)
Glad you solved your issue.
Glad you found the solution! I have a full-sized case and would definitely recommend them. They provide a ton of expansion slots and they often have great cooling.
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