Disc 0 activity spike with freezing, can it be fixed?

[Otakumegane]

So for a long time now, no matter how much I changed the settings, there would be a random sudden short freeze that would last around .1 sec. Checking the task manager, I found that Disc 0 (No idea what this does) spiked to 100% usage every time during those freezes.

Why is this happening and can I fix it? I'm not sure if the game freeze is causing the spike or the spike is causing the game freeze.

[KHg8m3r]

Did you try the latest dev build?

[shuffle2]

Try updating disk/southbridge drivers and/or run verification tools on the disc (like SMART or whatever).

[pauldacheez]

This is a side-effect of disc reads being done synchronously instead of asynchronously. There was a long discussion about this a while back on the IRC – eventual plans are to do it in an asynchronous fashion (which is actually more accurate if done correctly), though I don't think there was proper consensus as to the best way to do that. delroth already did this a while ago in the unmerged async-dvd branch, but it's not perfect and it broke a few games.

[delroth]

Not so sure about that - I've had rare very long freezes with Dolphin eating 100% of my disk IO for ~15s in the past, on healthy disks. There might be some DiscIO issues that we don't know about causing this issue.

[Otakumegane]

Ok then I'll try updating the drivers or something. Seems like it's bit of a tricky problem.

[Otakumegane]

Actually, how do I even update the drivers for the Disk 0?

[rokclimb15]

You don't. You would update the drivers for your drive controller. Look under disk controllers in hardware manager and post yours. Most are bundled with the chipset drivers for the motherboard.

Is it a SATA disk? What kind? Have you checked to make sure that it doesn't have the 1.5Gbps jumper set on a SATA 2.0 capable controller?

[Otakumegane]

Disk drive is a ST1000LM024 HN-M101MBB.

Well screw looking that crap up. Going to bite through the freezes and hopefully chuck something else in here soon.

[rokclimb15]

That's a decent 2.5" drive, but the cache is a little small. You might achieve better performance by installing a drive with a larger read cache (16MB+). Also make sure you're using AHCI in your BIOS and Windows Vista, 7, or 8. NCQ can make a big performance difference on a 5400rpm drive (most 2.5" drives are only 5400rpm).