Can a damaged drive cause fps drops?

[DeagleMaster]

Could a damaged hdd cause fps drops in games?

 

[Oshino Shinobu]

Shouldn't do. It could impact loading times, but FPS is mostly unaffected by the storage as it's run from RAM, not from the drive. 

 

 

[Bworde15]

2 minutes ago, DeagleMaster69 said:

Could a damaged hdd cause fps drops in games?

 

Nope it shouldn't.

[emosun]

A physically damaged hdd simply wouldn't function or load information.

hard drives are usualy "fine" or "100% broken"

a damaged FILE SYSTEM might cause a few problems though

[WereCat]

It can cause stuttering if the game cant load assets fast enough from the drive.

[AlwaysFSX]

17 minutes ago, Oshino Shinobu said:

Shouldn't do. It could impact loading times, but FPS is mostly unaffected by the storage as it's run from RAM, not from the drive. 

Might cause texture streaming issues if the game is heavy with that.

[vanished]

32 minutes ago, WereCat said:

It can cause stuttering if the game cant load assets fast enough from the drive.

And this would be quite noticeable in any open world game like GTA while driving as failing drives can often drop to sub 1 MB/s transfer speeds, which would not be enough to keep up.

 

OP, you can generally tell if a performance issue is IO related or not by standing in one spot and letting the game run, then moving around a lot and comparing.  If it's a rendering issue, it will just lag always, but if it's an IO issue, it will run fine while standing still but lag when looking around and moving to new areas.