Emulator Issues #12104
open
Feature request - Keep external HDD awake at all times if a game is loaded from there
Added by danileon95 about 4 years ago.
Updated about 4 years ago.
Issue type:
Feature request
Relates to performance:
No
Relates to maintainability:
No
Description
Like I said on https://bugs.dolphin-emu.org/issues/11876 there's extra stutter when loading games off an external drive. I think that this is, at least partly, because Windows tells the drive to go to sleep after a certain period of innactivity. This is a problem on games that only actually read the disc every once in a while, which are a lot: there'll be a huge pause while the hard drive starts to spin again. (there are other micro-stutters that also only happen when loading off HDDs and I don't think it's related to this but that's another matter entirely I guess...)
It would be nice if Dolphin was smart enough to detect when games are being loaded from an external drive and, when it's detected, keep the drive awake at all times. In fact, Dolphin could just do this in general for whatever drive you're loading games from, even if it's internal, there is absolutely no reason to ever let a drive sleep when a game has been launched from it.
Thanks!
At the end of the first paragraph I meant to say this: "...there are other micro-stutters that also only happen when loading off external HDDs..."
- Issue type changed from Bug to Feature request
This would be useful, but I'm not sure if there's any good API for it.
JosJuice wrote:
This would be useful, but I'm not sure if there's any good API for it.
Alternatively, we external drive users could also use an option to entire ISO to RAM upon loading. But you already know that :D
Couldn't Dolphin simply fake a read from the HDD every few seconds? Or is that too hacky?
an option to copy*...
I wish I could edit stuff here
Not only hacky, but also there's no guarantee that the read actually goes though and isn't getting cached by the OS.
Pikachu025 wrote:
Not only hacky, but also there's no guarantee that the read actually goes though and isn't getting cached by the OS.
Well, I mean, performance is so bad when loading from external HDDs even when they are awake that I really think the ultimate solution would be the option to copy the ISO to RAM.
In fact, performance is so stupidly bad that I think I'm going to open a separate issue for it since I really think Dolphin is doing something wrong when it comes to external drives...
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