2nd drive lagging?

[Triventular]

my setup consists of a 256gb ssd that i have as a boot drive and where most of my games are stored on. my second drive is a 640gb 5400 rpm hdd i salvaged from a laptop and its mostly used for general storage of my downloads and files. My problem is sometimes my hard drive takes long to open and sometimes it opens instantly and its not consistent at times. I configured shadowplay to save recordings and screenshots on hard drive and when i press the hot keys to record, it doesnt immediately record and will take some few seconds before it can record. sometimes when im prompted to save to it, it takes some time to be loaded.  Is there a way to minimize or just remove that lag? what programs can i use to make my drive perform better?

[Guest]

check power savings mode.  It may be spinning down to save power.  Some drives have that built into it.

[danomicar]

14 minutes ago, Triventular said:

my setup consists of a 256gb ssd that i have as a boot drive and where most of my games are stored on. my second drive is a 640gb 5400 rpm hdd i salvaged from a laptop and its mostly used for general storage of my downloads and files. My problem is sometimes my hard drive takes long to open and sometimes it opens instantly and its not consistent at times. I configured shadowplay to save recordings and screenshots on hard drive and when i press the hot keys to record, it doesnt immediately record and will take some few seconds before it can record. sometimes when im prompted to save to it, it takes some time to be loaded.  Is there a way to minimize or just remove that lag? what programs can i use to make my drive perform better?

5400 rpm is an unbearably slow speed compared to an SSD. Do you know how old the hard drive is?

[WereCatf]

7 minutes ago, Duck1 said:

check power savings mode.  It may be spinning down to save power.  Some drives have that built into it.

Yup. Windows 10 has this enabled by default. If my memory serves, it's set to put drives to sleep after being idle for 20 minutes or something.

[WereCatf]

Just now, danomicar said:

5400 rpm is an unbearably slow speed compared to an SSD. Do you know how old the hard drive is?

5400RPM is perfectly fine for recording to.

[Triventular]

38 minutes ago, danomicar said:

5400 rpm is an unbearably slow speed compared to an SSD. Do you know how old the hard drive is?

i got it from a 2nd hand laptop.. so its probably really old by now

[Triventular]

3 hours ago, WereCatf said:

Yup. Windows 10 has this enabled by default. If my memory serves, it's set to put drives to sleep after being idle for 20 minutes or something.

 

3 hours ago, Duck1 said:

check power savings mode.  It may be spinning down to save power.  Some drives have that built into it.

if its turned on by default, would not letting my drives sleep fix my problem?

[WereCatf]

Just now, Triventular said:

if its turned on by default, would not letting my drives sleep fix my problem?

The pauses you're experiencing are because the drive has gone to sleep and the platters inside it have stopped spinning, so when you or some games/app of yours tries to access the drive, Windows has to wake it up and get those platters spinning again -- it takes a couple of seconds for the platters to reach their 5400RPM-speed and stabilize, so Windows has to just pause everything and wait until the drive is ready.

 

The things you can do to fix this: disable HDD-sleep completely in power-settings, or set a longer time before it goes to sleep and e.g. open the drive in Explorer before you plan to start recording, so Windows wakes the drive back up and it's then ready and awake.