Diablo 3 performance problems due to hard disk?

I usually just lurk here but thought I'd post this as it might help someone else or someone with a bit more know how might be able to tell me whats going on.

I just bought diablo 3 a few days ago and have been plagued with nothing but slow matrix like performance. I have an r3 mx17 with the 6990m and had no issues running skyrim last week. I spent the last few days trying clean installs and every drivers I could lay my hands on all with no effect. I resided to the fact that it must be a server problem, cursed blizzard and went back to skyrim. Then last night I saw this thread on battle.net forums. In the topic the poster sugests copyin the whole diablo 3 folder to a USB stick and running it of that.

Here is whats causing the stuttering+solution - Forums - Diablo III

I thought I have nothing to lose and followed his advice and used an old 16gb USB 2.0.

It works flawlessly off the USB stick on highest settings with no stuttering, I closed the program and loaded the one on my hard disk and the stuttering started straight away?????

Now I'm running a raid array with the 2 500gb hybrid drives that dell sold with the mx17. I can't see how the USB can be quicker so is it some form of driver that I have not installed or a setting I missed???

Either way if your having issues with D3 you can give it a try or if you know what I need to do to get this running of my hard disk it would be appreciated.

Thanks Dave

 

There is a problem with some of the hybrid drive firmware versions. I know this from the days when I had an Asus G73 with Seagate 500GB hybrid drives in it. If your drives have any of these model numbers, make sure they have SD28 firmware or they will stutter in some games.

ST92505610AS
ST93205620AS
ST95005620AS

If your drives are of this model, you can get the firmware here: Momentus XT Firmware Update

 

Thanks I do have the st95005620as and don't have that firmware installed, just the update on the dell drivers site.

I took a look at the update and it say's that you should NOT run this on raid systems??? I'm running raid 0 so does that mean I'm stuck running off USB?

 

The update should not be run while in raid for sure. I don't know that this means you can't run them in raid after you update if you see what I mean. I didn't have raid on that old laptop so I have no idea. I'm pretty sure the document is telling you not to run the update on a raid drive array. You can do a backup, break the raid, update each drive, and then do a restore. It is easy to restore the original firmware if you don't like the new one. The firmware utility will flash older firmware without complaint. I tried and tested several on my drives one day and never lost any data or anything. Again... I didn't have raid and it would be a bad idea to try and flash them without first configuring them as regular drives in bios. After the flash is successful, I see no reason why you couldn't put them back to raid.

If you don't want to do that, any firmware newer than SD23 fixes the stuttering problem. I ran SD24, SD25, and SD26 each for a long time. There was no SD27 that I ever saw and that computer is currently running SD28 with no problems at all.

Also, just to be clear, if you turn off raid, the data is gone. You may know that already but I wanted to state that just in case you don't. After you flash, you could reconfigure them as raid again and restore the backup.

I think the stuttering comes from getting some garbage data in the ssd portion of the drive. I don't know of a way to clear that out without flashing a new firmware. The firmware newer than SD24 is supposed to keep it from corrupting the data to begin with. I recall people claiming that SD26 was bad because it disabled the ssd part of the drive. I never saw this on mine when I ran it. A lot of people just run SD25. That one fixes the stuttering at least.

 

I had a look at the non windows options and they offer a boot able cd that you can use. It says that you can try to update raided drives but it may corrupt the data. Thought I'd give it a try, I ran it and it said the firmware is incompatible???
The drive's are st95005620as ????
I think the problem might be related to the Dell firmware I updated on them in the past as the current firmware installed in them is DEM4?
Any ideas?
Thanks Dave

 

That happened with other people having the issue in the forums on the Asus side. They had to add command line switches to force the update if I remember correctly. I'm not saying you should do that. That's up to you. Personally, I would try to update them and if they don't work then I replace them with something else because drives that won't game properly don't have a place in my laptop but that's just me.

As a less risky procedure, maybe you should flash them with the Dell update again? If we are lucky, this may reset the SSD portion of your drives and maybe they will work right again. I think I decided after I used those hybrid drives for a while that the performance compared to a regular HD was almost undetectable and I wasn't going to buy those anymore. SSD or regular HD. The hybrids seem to be the worst of both worlds when they don't work right.

 

One option to try...although I dont know if this will have any effect or not, would be to run a disk defragment on the drives. This should wipe out the map for the SDD portion. It will have to re-learn the most used data, so will take a few times of running it for it to recognize what apps are used the most, but it is an easy option to try if everything else fails.

Also if you have disk deframentation turned on...make sure you disable it, otherwise the disks will have to re-learn what apps are used the most and will negate the whole purpose of the hybrid drives.

On a standard SSD drive windows disables this automatically, on the hybrid drives you should still defrag on occasion, but be aware that everytime you do the drive will have to go through the learning process all over again.

Not sure if this will help with the stuttering but just some helpful hints for hybrid drive use in general.

Good luck to you.