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HDD Spin-up bug

Icårus·12/20/2014, 12:44:02 AM·1 votes·951 views

There is a bug in which hard drive spin-up doesn't happen until one's client needs to load data in a game lobby. Unfortunately, this is pretty much the ONLY time in which a client taking a few seconds to load some data will cause the player to be A TOTAL JERK!

Mostly because there are a ton of errors that come about when the drive needs to spin up. Not just social problems like needing people to repeat their preferred positions and what not. Often times I'm forced to wait in the login screen for the game to end, because even closing and re-opening my client won't allow me to connect to a game, yet the central servers have still registered me as a player. So basically 9 other people are screwed out of an otherwise good game, and I have to wait 5 minutes after their game ends to join another queue. I feel terrible when that happens. And there's nothing to be done - it happens just because I go to write an e-mail or something between games. HDD spins down to save energy, and aaaawwwww... too bad for a team.

As a software developer myself, I had this exact problem. I solved the issue by performing a checksum on a file the first time a user presses a UI button after 5 minutes or longer. So basically the drive is forced to spin up so that the 2 KB can be read, and VOILA! no silly errors down the line due to emergent and unpredictable memory management bugs.

Enjoy! --Bryan

2 Comments

ANXUEXIAOLUOLI12/20/2014, 3:58:06 AM1 votes

Put League in an external storage is your first problem :/ I do not think the HDD that contains your C drive will sleep... At least it will not when you are using it.

When a software wants to read data from a HDD that is in sleep mode, the software will be suspended until the drive is ready. For most of the offline game, the game will just freeze for a few seconds, no error should occur. But League is different, other people are still moving, and data transfer to sever will be suspended too, so it cause problems.

Zyrixion12/20/2014, 12:04:01 PM1 votes

Alternative, write a small script to keep your HDD busy while you're playing, so it won't spin down at a bad time. It's a waste of a small amount of processing power and hdd read/write ability, but otherwise it should at least alleviate your issues while you wait for a (potential) permanent fix.

EX: small batch file that appends a character to a text file every so often, saving it to the drive to keep activity up.