This one is a bit of a head-scratcher.
I played Metroid Prime 3 early in the year and commented here about 2-3s long pauses in the emulation with a well-build, pre-compiled shader cache. I narrowed down the problem to the mechanical hard drive from which I was loading the game (game only, textures, cache and everything else was on SSD). I therefore moved my disc images to my other mechanical drive. I have not played much on Dolphin since I finished MP3 but started playing a bit of Mario Kart Wii recently, only to notice the same kind of pauses. Moving the game to my SSD as a test, I confirmed that the problem is disc access from my 2nd mechanical drive.
With the first one, I had concluded that the drive must have gone bad but I'm finding it too much of a coincidence that both drives have gone bad within 9 months. Granted, both are old, in fact I got the the first one over 10 years ago, so this is still a possibility. However, I would like to know if there are hard-drive specific setting in Windows 10 that I should be experimenting with. I think I had trying disabling indexing the first time this happened to no avail, but I will have to check again because I don't remember.
Is there anything else I could try?
I played Metroid Prime 3 early in the year and commented here about 2-3s long pauses in the emulation with a well-build, pre-compiled shader cache. I narrowed down the problem to the mechanical hard drive from which I was loading the game (game only, textures, cache and everything else was on SSD). I therefore moved my disc images to my other mechanical drive. I have not played much on Dolphin since I finished MP3 but started playing a bit of Mario Kart Wii recently, only to notice the same kind of pauses. Moving the game to my SSD as a test, I confirmed that the problem is disc access from my 2nd mechanical drive.
With the first one, I had concluded that the drive must have gone bad but I'm finding it too much of a coincidence that both drives have gone bad within 9 months. Granted, both are old, in fact I got the the first one over 10 years ago, so this is still a possibility. However, I would like to know if there are hard-drive specific setting in Windows 10 that I should be experimenting with. I think I had trying disabling indexing the first time this happened to no avail, but I will have to check again because I don't remember.
Is there anything else I could try?
Windows 11 | i7-9700K | NVidia RTX 4060 Ti 8GB | 32GB DDR4-3000