[Hardware] Why does your hard drive make more noise when you minimize a game?

[#Steeven.™]

If you are users of a PC with a hard drive and you play often, the most likely thing is that it will have happened to you more than once. As soon as you minimize the game or inadvertently press the Windows key, the hard drive starts spinning very fast and the fans all over the PC turn on. Well, if it happens to you, it is completely normal and we are going to explain the reason behind it.

Every PC today uses a multitasking operating system and, therefore, can handle several applications at the same time, what happens is that when one of them exits the user interaction change, what it does is put itself in a mode in which it continues to function to carry out tasks that are essential for it to be operational.
 

This is why your hard drive makes more noise
The answer to this is simple and don't worry, your computer is not malfunctioning or your hard drive is not starting to fail. Of course, as long as you don't hear the always dreaded noise. If not, this has an explanation, but for this we have to take into account that all programs have three modes of execution:

• In the first, the program is active, the cursor or the pointer is over it and, therefore, it is interacting with the user. Here the application uses all the resources it needs of processor and RAM.
• In the second, the application is on the screen or minimized, at any time it can be recovered and consequently we are interested in having it in memory, although in a way that consumes fewer resources.
• Already in last place are those applications that have not been closed, but that lack space in RAM, have taken a "photograph" of their situation in RAM and copied them to the hard drive or SSD drive.

Knowing this, we can conclude that when we play a game in full screen, what the system does is move all the applications to the second or third state. Of course, it would be best to have as much RAM memory as possible to avoid this, and always in dual-module configurations. The bottleneck, on the other hand, comes from the fact that the hard drive cannot access more than one piece of data at the same time and at that moment we end up overloading it.

 

Doesn't it happen with an SSD?
Well no, due to the fact that they have no moving parts. Unfortunately, Windows in order to move data from the storage unit to RAM and vice versa, sizes that a hard drive can support are still used. So today, due to the support of operating systems, it continues to happen, but in a different way.

A hard drive is like having a car or a utility to make a move, a SATA SSD is like having several cars at the same time and a PCIe SSD is like having several moving trucks. The problem is that Windows fills one of the moving trucks with the capacity of a car. That is, it does not reduce the number of accesses between both parties and increases the time in which both parties communicate.

The best solution? A direct copy of the state of the RAM on the SSD in each application to recover it as it is, but carrying that amount of information from the hard disk would take us eons to recover the system due to the workload, so much so that we would think that we have been hung up the PC.

 

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