Games running significantly slower on secondary hard drive?

Question

I just bought a 750gb IDE hard drive (Seagate) and installed it alongside my original 120gb SATA drive.

Problem is, I'm finding that games run significantly slower when I install them on the IDE drive. Most games have some stuttering, and a few even drop into single digit frame rates (said games run fine in the 30-60 fps range when installed on my primary drive).

I know IDE is slower than SATA, but this is just ridiculous. Is there anything else that could be causing this? The IDE drive seems to be working normally, it transfers files and plays movies at what appears to be a normal speed.

NOTE:

I used the 80-wire ribbon that was included with the HD, and attached it by itself to the unused IDE3 port (I have 2 CD drives on IDE1 and a floppy on IDE2). So it's not a cable problem.

I've noticed that I get slowdown on newer games (i.e. Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter, Rainbow Six Lockdown), but older games seem to run fine (i.e. Red Faction 2, No One Lives Forever).

I actually tested the issue with an external drive, and I got the same results: slight slowdown on newer games, with a few specific games being extremely affected (corrupted graphics or unplayable stuttering). All games work fine on my primary HD.

The Virtual Memory explanation makes the most sense so far, but I'm not computer-saavy enough to know how much it's the cause of the issue.

Anyway, my biggest disappointment is that my new IDE drive doesn't appear to be more efficient that an external hard drive.

Answer 1

Your IDE drive could just be running at UDMA 1 or 2 instead of UDMA 5 especially if it is on the same ribbon cable as the CD drive and using a 40 wire instead of 80 wire ribbon. Try running it independent of the CD drive and with 80 wire ribbon cable.

Answer 2

The problem is not with the IDE/SATA difference, but it is rather a technical limitation of Windows, Motherboards, and how they both access memory.

Im not sure on the specifics as to why this is, but only primary drives may have space set aside for virtual memory. No matter how much RAM you add, there will always be some files dumped into virtual memory for later use. Since you dont have any, the game must load these files from the drive on the fly. You can see this for yourself by checking the page file allocation sizes for each drive, you will see your secondary drive is set to 0 and you are unable to change this.

The only other thing I could see being a problem is the speed of the drive. Are you sure its a 7200RPM drive?

The size of the hard drive will barely effect how quickly data is returned. The arm (which reads the data) and the plates (which hold the data) are the same physical size as any other drive. If your drive is a 7200 RPM, that means the plate spins full circle 7200 times each minute. The HD arms typically whip back and forth over the plate at speeds upwards of 40MPH. In short, your hard drive can handle the space..... no question!

Answer 3

It is the size of the HDD that causes this. Your computer now has to access 720GB instead of just 120GB. Logically which one would you say will give you faster response times?

Big hard drives like that are meant for storage purposes and nothing else. If you want performance try RAID or having similar sized HDD's (two 120GB's)

Answer 4

You may need to do a defrag.