G9-592-792E

Slayer720

But I have a question does disabling APM break the had drive in anyway

AJ-KW

Disabling hard disk drive advanced power management (configure HDD APM level)

 

HDD APM explained in brief

The Advanced Power Management feature (APM) present in virtually all modern hard disk drives is aimed to save energy and power consumption by regulating the performance of the hard disk drive. Power consumption is reduced by adjusting spin speeds and disabling internal components when not in use. Aggressive power saving settings allow the hard disk drive to stop its spindle motor and park heads more frequently, which allows saving as much energy as possible, but put stress on mechanics and leads to delays on drive reads caused by waiting the magnetic disks to spin up to the necessary speed. In other words saving energy is achieved by decreasing performance and to a certain extent shortens drive life.

HDD APM and hard disk drive clicking sounds

Many users have reported a problem with hard drive clicking, sometimes described as a repeating tick tick tick type of ticking sound, or a faint beep at random intervals. The click sound is usually caused by the drive parking its head. There are multiple causes for that, including power management and shock detection.The clicking sound occurs only when the drive is idle. Forcing the drive to be busy delays ticking. Launching programs that access the hard drive, such as indexing or defragmenting the drive, helps for a while. Of course there is always a better option. As clicking sounds are related to drive head parking it is possible to completely eliminate them by changing the Advanced Power Management (APM) settings and taking control over operation of hard disk.

 

Source: http://disablehddapm.blogspot.com/2011/12/disabling-hard-disk-drive-advanced.html

 

Hope this helps!

 

AJ

Slayer720

Hi everyone to all of you guys/girls who have issues like minifreezes eg . ( 0.5 second freezes during playing any game and having 100 percent risk usage)and other related issues with the harddrive.
Note: this solution is for people who have western digital drives in their predator laptops it may work for other laptops but this solution is for western digital hdd owners like me .

Ceztko :
The problem has also plagued me a lot and since there are no helpful answers in this thread (and I share similar setup of the poster) I decided to reply even if it is very old, hoping that it will be helpful for others. In my experience, spikes like these are very often related to the HDD power management: especially in laptops, HDD are configured for aggressive power saving so they tend to park heads very often when there are no reads/writes pending. Especially when using a dual SDD/HDD configuration, people may choose to have lower priority applications or user data on the HDD. Games automatic saving events (in the HDD, of course) were for me cause of massive slowdowns, so the spikes may not be related to slow read times for the game data itself. Describing what fixed the spikes for me:
With a tool like CrystalDiskInfo[*], set the ATA APM Control to a value greater of 128 (80 hexadecimal) to a maximum of 254 (FE hexadecimal). 254 should mean APM disabled. I observed this in my Western Digital WDC WD10JPVX-22JC3T0: the manufacture default value was 96 (60 hexadecimal) that should mean quite aggressive Power Management, while others WD drivers default to 128 (80 hexadecimal) in Windows. Ubuntu Linux by default uses utilities to full disable it with 254 (FE hexadecimal).
(Western Digital only) As I use HDD as a non system drive, writes are not so frequent so heads parking events are very frequent. I used the the old DOS util wdidle3.exe (version 1.05 has no more official download but can be found quite easily) to increase the timer for heads parking to the default of 8 seconds to the maximum of 300 (5 minutes). This setting alone was mitigating the problem but not fully fixing it. It can be done but I chose not to fully disable it.
Hopefully soon we won't have HDD anymore in laptops so we won't have to bother with this kind of problems in the future.

[*] APM Controls is in "Function -> Advance Features -> AAM/APM Control". As the set APM control setting is not persistent, check "Function -> Resident", "Function -> Startup", "Function -> Advance Features -> Auto AAM/APM Adaptation".

credits goes to ceztko for the fix



Thread : http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/forums/t/548833/games-lag-for-1-3-seconds-not-a-memory-issue/

Slayer720

Hi I would like to also say that this answers the other minifreezes thread on this forum. I hope all the best