2nd SSD for the OS/Applications

[Dave3000]

I right now have a Samsung 840 Pro 512 GB SSD that I partitioned into a 452 GB "Games" partition and a 60 GB "OS" partition. In some games I'm getting 1-second stutters and it's due to full SSD activity. I was thinking about buying a 128 GB Samsung 840 Pro for just the OS (Windows 8.1 Pro) and Applications (MS Office, Photoshop, etc) and keeping just my games on the 512 GB SSD. Would this get rid of the stuttering? An example of games I get these stutters are X-Plane 10, Castlevania LoS, and Grid Autosport.

 

[h9826790]

In my experience, both gaming in Windows and OSX, the HDD or SSD speed may affect the loading speed, but very unusual to cause stutters. Also, I'd try to make a RAM disk and load game from it. Almost no improvement observe compare to SSD. I can also load game from a USB 2 external HDD with no in game problem (of course, long loading time). I really doubt that if the stutters cause by the SSD activities.

 

[Essence_of_War]

In some games I'm getting 1-second stutters and it's due to full SSD activity

How did you diagnose this as an SSD bottleneck? I don't think that it's impossible, in principle at least, to have stuttering as textures load, but before you drop good money on additional devices, it might be useful to walk through your benchmarking procedure to make sure the bottlenecks are where you think they are.

 

[Charlie98]

Why do you have the SSD partitioned in the first place? By it's very nature an SSD cannot create a true disk partition. If you have it for backup or image purposes (smaller backups of OS only partition) then I would agree about getting a separate SSD for the OS.

...and I agree with the others... I think your stuttering is caused elsewhere. I have X-Plane 10 on my 840Pro (Desk3 in sig) and any stuttering is certainly caused by the CPU... or anything besides the SSD.

 

[KingFatty]

What is meant by "due to full SSD activity"? Do you mean that the bandwidth is saturated, and how did you figure that out?

 

[Dave3000]

By full SSD activity, I mean when I go the the Task Manager's performance monitor to check the disk transfer rate graph at the point when the stuttering occurred, the disk transfer rate was at 100%. I was running the Task Manager's performance monitor while playing the game. I didn't test it out with the games I mentioned in this thread but the task manager showed full disk transfer rate in Prince of Persia: Forgotten Sands when it stuttered while turning another direction and Wolfenstiein: The New Order during the cutscenes if I have Ultra settings. Actually I still had that problem with Wolfenstien installed on my HDD instead of my SSD as well, and the stutters in the cutscenes were not less noticeable on the SSD. With the games I mentioned in my first post, it was the same kind of stutter, and that's why I assumed it was because my disk was being busy. It's not from a lack of RAM obviously since I have 32 GB RAM.

I have a "Games" partition on my SSD because it saves me time after doing a fresh Windows install as I don't have to copy my backed up Steam and Origin games from my USB hard drive to my SSD and my games are ready play, except a few of my Steam games need to have the cache integrity verified or else they won't start but that's faster than copying them back to my SSD and running "Install" for Steam to discover the game files for each game I copied back. I keep games I'm currently playing and most of my games backlog on that partition. I also keep X-Plane 10 on the "Games" partition on my SSD since it does not require reinstallation after reinstalling Windows and doing it this way saves me time if I ever have to reinstall Windows. Have a dedicated "Games" partition and a dedication "OS" partition is not the cause of the stuttering as I also had stutter issues with OS and games on the same partition, in case anyone here is wondering.

Also you can partition an SSD. That's what Windows 8.1 setup does when I want to do a fresh reinstall of Windows 8.1, it makes a 350 MB reserve partition automatically when I tell it to reinstall Windows in the unallocated space.

Would this be more of a video card issue than a disk issue that causes the 1-second stuttering? Like the VRAM in my video card might be defective and so it might be accessing the graphics from disk rather than VRAM at the point of those stutters?

 

[Dave3000]

About 25 minutes into X-Plane 10 I got a 4-second stutter followed by a slightly shorter stutter. I was running the Task Manager's performance monitor while running this game. It showed that my CPU was at full utilization at the time of the stuttering and the disk transfer rate was at full speed at the time of the stuttering. I have a i7-4930k CPU, not overclocked. Probably it's loading up the next area of scenery?

 

[Phynaz]

Resource monitor will tell you which process is hitting the disk. I'm betting a virus scanner.

 

[Dave3000]

It will be too late to find out exactly is making the disk and CPU busy at the time of the stuttering. Even if I run games in a window while running the performance monitor in a window, the second I see a stutter, then check the resource monitor what caused it, it would be too late.

 

[beginner99]

Some games are just crappy and stutter. I had that issue with Stalker:COP. That game just has terrible stutter that makes me sick. I wasted hours trying to fix it including moving it to the SSD. But even low-res + ssd did not fix it. There was no difference to running it from the ssd or the green drive.

Yes, Virus scanner makes sense as a possible culprit besides the game being crap.