HDD stops working while playing

SlimShady1025 · July 23, 2018

Hello. Lately I have this problem that's becoming more and more frequent. While I play The Witcher 3, usually in cut scenes blurs itself out and the loading icon appears and it basically stays that way. It doesn't freeze because the loading icon keeps spinning it just doesn't load. I'm able to close the game, and close steam but now if I want to go into that hard drive partition it will freeze instantly and Not respond. I can use any other program not tied in any way with that HDD. For example, Chrome and VLC work perfectly but if i try to open a program from my SSD that would in any way use the frozen HDD, that program won't start. I checked the HDD with CrystalDisk and it says it's Good. Also, I can't recall it ever doing that while playing other games. The temps for my HDD are never higher than 40 even with the GPU going at it right next to it.

As for frequency of this happening or the time it takes for the HDD to freeze. It happened once last week and for the past few days it's been happening every time I play. Usually it takes some time for the HDD to freeze but it's doing it faster and faster.

I'm running Windows 10 Pro 64bit

My specs are:

Intel i7 6700k 4.00Ghz(base clock)

8 GB DDR4 2133Mhz RAM

GTX 1080 Gibabyte Windforce

Corsair VS550

Hope I gave enough info on the matter :).

Electronics Wizardy · July 23, 2018

Check the smart data of the drive with something like crystal disk info. Id probably get a new drive and restoer backups. Make sure your backups are good.

SlimShady1025 · July 25, 2018

Sorry the late response. I checked my HDD with crystal disk info and it said the drive is ok. Here, I'll even attach a screenshot. The problem is I don't know how to read the values in the SMART data to try and pinpoint a problem. The fact that I can download on the hdd at 10-12 Mbps without it freezing but playing a game does is bugging me.

I searched online to see how to read the SMART data but it didn't really clarify things. I already got a new HDD and it should arrive tomorrow but if this one is fine and there is just a stupid little obvious problem that I'm overseeing I would hate to throw money out the window.