HDD stutter on Acer Nitro 5 AN515-51

Himiko

I have had this laptop for almost 2 years now and the 1tb HDD has always bothered me. It seems to be ok, but whenever it needs to load a sound in a game or anywhere else it just freezes for a second. I don't know if it's isolated to the HDD alone, it seems that system sounds also do the same thing (the sound you get from the dialogue box that asks if you want changes to be made to your pc). The sounds are either late or just the whole application freezes up before it can play it, sometimes acts in both ways on the same application. It caused me several issues in some games to the point where I cannot play them and the space on the SSD is really limited. Does it have to be replaced or is there something I can do?

andylb

Why do you think it's your HDD? I would go to Device Manager and uninstall (not update) my sound card, restart and it will reinstall it, tell us if that helped

Himiko

It's not the soundcard, installing games on the SSD seemingly makes them run better without the stutter. However there is an obvious example if the game uses files from both drives. I am playing GTA IV on my SSD, but the game uses custom music which is installed on the HDD, so every time it loads the music the game either freezes up for a second, continues playing but sounds glitch out for a second and replay the last few seconds or the game completely refuses to load any sounds again until restart. The last one is rare fortunately, but still really uncomfortable when it happens. Works fine on any other computer, but not my laptop.

andylb

New one on me, I've never had that problem with my HDD

Himiko

The HDD is wdc wd10spzx-21z10t0 if that helps

Himiko

I only now realized that the HDD has some sort of spinning down while not in use kind of power saving feature, every few seconds when it's not in use it shuts down. If anyone knows a way to disable that I would appreciate it.