Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

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?

Have you disabled power management for the hard drives? It's somewhere under advanced power management, "allow Windows to turn the device off" or something.

If it freezes for more than 0.5 seconds i assume that it's not a slow HDD but something else. 2-3 seconds sounds about right for a HDD waking up from sleep mode before being able to do anything. Or the HDD is actually near dead and needs 2-3 seconds to recover from whatever from time to time.

On a Wii, you get *too* fast loading times when you use a HDD compared to the optical disc drive, so HDD speed is very unlikely to be an issue. And that's with usb 2.0 limiting the transfer speed in between.

Thanks for the tip; it was a really good lead. The setting you describe is actually for USB devices and it can be found in Device Manager: right-click a USB device, then select "Power Management". My drives are SATA so the closest thing is setting the time before sleep to 0 in Control Panel's Power Management section, which effectively disables sleep. I just tried it and it did not help, unfortunately. I still ran into a full 2s pause in MKW. Curiously, I've begun to notice that some of these extended pauses happen when crossing the finish line while in the middle of race. This may be purely coincidental but I've had it happen a few times so it caught my attention.

If you think of anything else, please let me know.