Using a 2nd hard drive to play games

[Blue Jay]

I have been experiencing some crashes due to playing games recently. My processor and graphics card are more than enough to run the games, it's just my disk that gets up to 99% when I play. When the game gets intense my computer screen will black out and the fan in the computer will get loud (that or the hard drive, idk). A simple reset fixes it.

So my solution is to get a bigger and better hard drive with higher RPMs in order to run my games. Does this work? Can I run the OS off the original HD and then play games off the new HD?? It seems to make sense but after looking in to it I've seen that it's probably more complicated than I assume.

Thanks for any help!

-Blue Jay

[Geek-9pm]

No. Is you disk near full? I doubt it.

Remove stuff you will never use from your hard drive.
Run the check disk tool in windows and test drive for bad sectors.
Run the defrag utility.

If that does not help, consider getting a SSD as your second drive.
A 16 Gb SSD should be more that enough for any game.

[Blue Jay]

Oh okay. Is there such thing as HDs that run slower than others? Cause my computer is pretty much new, I have tons of space left. I was thinking I could get a "gaming" HD that would run faster so it's not hitting 99%+ when I play.

Is that the case or is an SSD my only option, then?

Thanks a bunch

[DaveLembke]

SSD is best option. Before SSD's people used RAID 0 including myself as well as a trick like short stroking a drive

RAID 0 (Desktop or Gamer class laptops that have room for 2 hard drives to work as a pair. http://www.raid-calculator.com/raid-types-reference.aspx

Short Stroking http://lifehacker.com/how-to-short-stroke-your-hard-drive-for-optimal-speed-1598306074

Faster than SSD is RAMDrive which allocates RAM to act like a hard drive, but data stored on this drive is wiped out on shutdown unless you have a server with battery RAM to save RAM state, and the data has to copy from HDD ot SSD to RAMDrive at boot to which the data in the RAMdrive is as fast as your RAM itself. (*Most people dont use RAMDrives unless they have lots of extra RAM and whatever game or program they are running can fit within the allocated RAM space. ) I have played with RAMDrives but dont have a system with enough RAM to make it a permanent edition to my build. The SSD I have is fast enough. Although the RAMDrive is like 20 x faster than a SSD with DDR2 800Mhz RAM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAM_drive

[Mark.]

@blue jay,

yes you can get faster HDD (mechanical) units.

typically a laptop drive (2.5") has a RPM of 5400, but some have 7200.
a desktop drive (3.5") is normally 7200 but you can get 10,000 and if you have more money than sense there are even 15,000 units out there.

but with games, the bottleneck is not normally I/O speeds to the drive but with your GPU.

for my money, bite the bullet and go SSD.  250GB units are $AUD140.
and although they aren't a big improvement during the game, they will remove any drive bottleneck.

as to your original question, can you run the OS off the old drive and the game off the new drive - of course you can.
you only have to change the default folder location while you install the game to that second drive.

BUT...  anything OS related that the game may do, like access Temp folders, pagefile, etc, will still hit the old drive.
so anything game related will go to the new drive, anything OS related will still use the original drive.

[Blue Jay]

Hey, THANKS A BUNCH everyone for answering my question. You guys are all great, and I'm excited to be part of the community. This seems like a stellar site. Glad to have a place to learn and get some solid info.

[CyborgTJB]

A 16 Gb SSD should be more that enough for any game.

I think GTA5 is more then 50GB, how is it more then enough?

[BC_Programmer]

I think GTA5 is more then 50GB, how is it more then enough?

He's, understandably, not very familiar with current game offerings, which sometimes leads to unusual conclusions.

[RedKpălărie]

You may want to check you power mgmt settings.  If you screen shot the image similar to the one I linked with all the options expanded someone may chime in. I bet your problem is here. Sometimes the settings in a desktop are keyed like a laptop and "selective disable" may be enabled, or when power consumption is very high, the OS will shut down non-essential tasks or devices to save what it thinks is battery power, or your money. If USB sleep / awake is disabled in the bios this may cause you to have to reboot. Oddly, on some MB's USB sleep / awake disabled is default.



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