Secondary Hard Disk falling asleep during games

Hardware HDD's & SSD's
1

Greetings to the smart people of the tek! =)


I have a problem with my HD; it keeps going in to sleep during games. To give some detail: I'm on a laptop (asus n53sn) it had a slow hard drive to begin with, so I upgraded to an SSD and swapped the DVD drive with a HD caddy to use the old hd as storage..

I don't know if the caddy is the problem but what happens nowadays is when I'm playing a game from the HDD, I get 1-2 seconds of freeze whenever the game asks for certain assets like a sound file or an image. I experienced this in Planetside 2, dota 2 and Starcraft. On some cases I can hear the HD start spinning which takes a while and the game resumes. If I am playing online this lags the game to other people as well if it's p2p.

To give an example, in Starcraft the game loads fairly fast with great performance but after the first 10 minutes if I select a new unit or a building there is 1-2 sec freeze and the game resumes. It becomes so bad that duiring the game's campaign mode as the characters speak and a new one starts talking the game freezes for 2 secs which results in that character's speech ending before the audio can catch up, resulting in sync issues and not being able to hear what they were saying.


I checked the power savings options and the drive is set not to go to sleep.I even moved the pagefile to the secondary HD to keep it spinning but it doesn't help. I also heard that some Laptop HDs are hard coded to go  to sleep no matter what windows tells it to do.

Any help is appreciated thanks. 

2

if you are gaming via a HD caddy speed will be limmited to how you connect this device to your laptop.  Are you using usb2?

3

Thanks for the answer! The caddy connects the HD via direct SATA connection to the Laptop's mainboard as far as I'm aware.

It's quite similar to this. http://www.newmodeus.com/pics/HP_dv4/dv4_caddy_HDD_insertsm.jpg

4

Go into power Setting and change power profile to High and under Advanced setting make sure That put hard Drive to sleep when applicable is unchecked.. I asume you are runing Windows...

5

Thank you threejs30, I wrote in the original post that I did check those settings.

6

I'm sorry about that was at work and speed replied..that is interesting then. Have you tried to connect it on a difefent sata port / diff machine. It really does sound like power profile settings but since you checked that I'm at a loss...I wonder if the caddy system has a green / low power consuption setting. It is strange...... Also check bios settings to make sure there isn't some power save option selected once again. 

7

It's completely ok, I'm thankful for you for commentin =) Unfortunately since it's a laptop my options are limited. Bios isn't configurable at all and I can't connect it to another port. Maybe it's the hard drive itself that's faulty, I'm gonna try the bios again just to be sure.