Harddrive thrashing around alot

Omnicron420 · Post by **Omnicron420** » Tue, 11. Nov 08, 06:11

Hey guys I'm having a problem with X3TC. I never had a problem with x3r. When playing at time my hard drive is thrashing around so much it causes my system to hang for a minute then it starts going again then starts hanging again while it reads more data. I am wondering if its my video system (lack of video memory) or if my system is just to slow for the game. Any other game I play (HL2,Bioshock, World in Conflict and so on so forth) does not have any issue. I have tried shutting off all programs I am not using while playing, AV and so forth. Nothing seems to help. Here is my system specs:
Vista Ultimate 64bit
2 Gigs of DDR2 6400 in dual channel mode
AMD AM2 X2 6000+ @ 3 GHZ
2 IBM Raptors 36gig in raid 1
2 Nvidia 8600 GTS 256Meg in SLI mode
I'm running the most recent drivers for everything in my system.

Omnicron420 · Post by **Omnicron420** » Tue, 11. Nov 08, 06:38

I forgot, I am running 1280x1024x32 with glow enabled,4x anti and 4x arisotropic. Texture and shader is set to high.

fireslide · Post by **fireslide** » Tue, 11. Nov 08, 08:04

First try setting textures to medium.

http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=219062&start=0

This helped ppl with vista and under 3Gb Ram, but your case seems a bit extreme.

EventHorizon · Post by **EventHorizon** » Tue, 11. Nov 08, 09:39

As above said, bring the texture setting down to medium. Also, reduce your AA and AF. Your graphics card has 256Mb of RAM (even in SLi), but the Vista drive model allows the card to use system ram as well. Well, my previous card bust it's 320Mb frame buffer and (because X3TC uses a lot of ram) ended up paging a load of textures to the hard disk

You could also try to rename 00002.dat to 00002.dat.old (under the mov folder). This will remove the in-game floating advert videos and does reduce hard drive access a lot.

Thygrrr · Post by **Thygrrr** » Tue, 11. Nov 08, 12:40

Same here, especially the "plink plink" sounds my harddrive makes are unique to X³TC, and quite worrying.

EventHorizon · Post by **EventHorizon** » Tue, 11. Nov 08, 13:25

I would not worry about the noises coming from the hard drive. X3TC will not be accessing these in any way other than 'normal'. Of course, if you drive is on it's way out (it happens) then it won't help either.

What would be nice is a way to turn the advertising screens off with an in-game setting.

Also, one thing that might seem obvious (but is very easy to forget). Set your AV to not scan the X3TC folder under it's real-time scan settings. That will save a lot of HDD access, CPU cycles and RAM. Some of those files are pretty big.

Omnicron420 · Post by **Omnicron420** » Tue, 11. Nov 08, 15:00

Thanks guys. So my system may need a upgrade. If I was to upgrade to 4 gigs of ram would this help or would a new video system be of more benifit? I plan on building a new system in a few months and didnt want to put out to much money right now.

Post by **CBJ** » Tue, 11. Nov 08, 15:06

Please use the off-topic forum to discuss hardware recommendations, as stated in the System Requirements sticky thread.

Omnicron420 · Post by **Omnicron420** » Tue, 11. Nov 08, 15:10

CBJ wrote:Please use the off-topic forum to discuss hardware recommendations, as stated in the System Requirements sticky thread.

Sorry if this is posted in the wrong forum, I figured it was the right place as I'm trying to trouble shoot if its the game or my system that is casuing the long harddrive reads.

cucher · Post by **cucher** » Tue, 11. Nov 08, 15:39

My opinion, both of them

ezra-r · Post by **ezra-r** » Tue, 11. Nov 08, 15:44

Omnicron420 wrote:Hey guys I'm having a problem with X3TC. I never had a problem with x3r. When playing at time my hard drive is thrashing around so much it causes my system to hang for a minute then it starts going again then starts hanging again while it reads more data. I am wondering if its my video system (lack of video memory) or if my system is just to slow for the game. Any other game I play (HL2,Bioshock, World in Conflict and so on so forth) does not have any issue. I have tried shutting off all programs I am not using while playing, AV and so forth. Nothing seems to help. Here is my system specs:
Vista Ultimate 64bit
2 Gigs of DDR2 6400 in dual channel mode
AMD AM2 X2 6000+ @ 3 GHZ
2 IBM Raptors 36gig in raid 1
2 Nvidia 8600 GTS 256Meg in SLI mode
I'm running the most recent drivers for everything in my system.

I bet you five bucks you reduce hard disk trashing by 99% if you turn hardware sound accel off.

EventHorizon · Post by **EventHorizon** » Tue, 11. Nov 08, 15:49

ezra-r wrote:I bet you five bucks you reduce hard disk trashing by 99% if you turn hardware sound accel off.

Can I have the 5 bucks please

He's using Vista, so there is no sound hardware acceleration.

cucher · Post by **cucher** » Tue, 11. Nov 08, 15:51

2 ezra-r: Don't think the same way absolutely. I have the similar frequent HDD access. Wrote about it here:

http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=221807

and here:

http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=222231

Tycow · Post by **Tycow** » Tue, 11. Nov 08, 15:52

ezra-r wrote:I bet you five bucks you reduce hard disk trashing by 99% if you turn hardware sound accel off.

Also, doesn't fix anything for me. Doing this actually increases the amount of stuttering in my game!

Stupid X-fi's!

Metalli · Post by **Metalli** » Tue, 11. Nov 08, 16:12

2GB RAM with Vista, doesn't that ring any bells??

Also, as a general note for Vista. Turn off Windows Search, SuperFetch and Volume Shadow Copy (System Restore) if you want to reduce HDD access.

Omnicron420 · Post by **Omnicron420** » Tue, 11. Nov 08, 21:16

Well 2 gigs of ram has been fine with all the other games I have played. I unload all programs I dont need when playing and havnt had any problems in other games.

What is funny is when I enter a sector, the game pauses while it loads data then starts playing again. After a few more minutes of flying around looking for work it does it again. Its the most annoying when trying to fight...there nothing like getting 2 shots off then waiting 30 seconds to a minute to get another few shots off. After 3-4 times doing this I can finish the fight till the next 'load'. God I'm not some newbie at computers, I started out with a 80286 computer connecting to bbs many many years ago. I have all the crap that windows installs trimmed down. I have tried many different graphic settings and still nothing seems to help. I loaded up X3R and played for 30 minutes this morning and didnt have any HDD access like I have with X3TC. I have the Steam version if that matters.

ezra-r · Post by **ezra-r** » Tue, 11. Nov 08, 21:22

Well, if its Vista and 2 Gigabytes of RAM the OS is swapping a lot normally since X3:TC will use up around 1.3 gigas + 700 megabytes Vista uses noramlly.. there you go.. no more ram left, swapping around, hardware trashing.

Get more RAM then

Omnicron420 · Post by **Omnicron420** » Wed, 12. Nov 08, 01:23

Well I added another 2 gigs of ram this afternoon and the results are ok but after 30 minutes of game play my HDD's start thrashing around again...so at this point I am at a loss. It's been over 14 months since I wipped my harddrives and started over (last time was when I installed Vista) so maybe it's a puter problem...but I dont have this issue with my other games I play. I'm lost.

Metalli · Post by **Metalli** » Wed, 12. Nov 08, 05:48

Well, did you turn off the services I mentioned?

Omnicron420 · Post by **Omnicron420** » Wed, 12. Nov 08, 06:28

Yes they are off before I ever start a game I turn them off.

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Harddrive thrashing around alot

Harddrive thrashing around alot

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