Overwatch wakes/accesses ALL harddrives on startup

Bug Report
1

Context: us[dot]forums[dot]blizzard[dot]com/en/overwatch/t/overwatch-slow-to-start-maybe-due-to-external-hdd/405716?u=omni-11876

Steps to reproduce:

  1. Have at least 2 hard drives (internal and external mix is OK). Have at least one of those hard drives be media-only (i.e. no data related to the OS, Overwatch, or BNet).
  2. Open Overwatch via BNet’s “Play” button.

Expected:
Overwatch loads and starts based on the drives that you have the OS/OW installed on without accessing the other unrelated drives.

Actual:
Overwatch loading is blocked on waiting for the slowest drive to wake up. If you have an external HDD enclosure that has hardware sleep built in (i.e. not OS controlled), then this can often make OW take 60s to launch (vs 5s that it does when the drive is disconnected).

See the context link I posted above for additional details, but basically it seems like Overwatch is requesting metadata for ALL installed disk drives instead of only the one it is installed on for some reason. This means that with sleeping (or even slow to respond) drives can drastically slow down OW loading time, rendering high-performance SSDs useless for initial startup.

The way I confirmed this was to install Sysinternals Process Monitor and monitor all drives (see answers[dot]microsoft[dot]com/en-us/insider/forum/insider_wintp-insider_files-insiderplat_pc/10074-waking-idle-drives-for-no-reason/e5bca3bf-4663-4281-a9fd-07b82d3e7efb). Every drive received a metadata ping on OW startup.

I’m running:

  • Windows 10 Pro N x64
  • AMD Ryzen 1700X
  • 16gb RAM
  • 1 SATA SSD (for OS)
  • 1 NVME M2 SSD (for games)
  • 3 internal HDDs (for media)
  • 1 external HDD (for media)

Please let me know if you need additional data.

2 Likes
2

Chiming in to say I’ve experienced this as well, but I am also regularly getting HDD wakes done by Windows, though I suspect that the two are unrelated.

Running just one SATA SSD as a boot drive (with OW installed), and this has happened with two different HDD installed.

Ryzen 3700X system, but I don’t experience this with any other Blizzard game. The same thing also happens when launching the BNet client.

As per the OP, please let me know if you need additional data.

3

Is OW, the launcher and all directories installed on the SSD? I suspect something connected to the game might be on different drives and wakes ALL sata devices while loading. Like: Game is on the M.2 but there are folders like Overwatch>Settings/Logs/Screenshots on your C:/ SSD, which is sharing a sata interface with all the HDD.

4

I experience this as well. Have 8 hard drives. The externals do not spin up in my case but my one internal spinner does every launch. It’s a bulk storage drive with no programs on it and is not used for backup purposes. OS and games each have their own SSD.