I've been getting loading screens (to load saves, towns) up to 3-4 minutes long, as well as random freezing with the loading icon at the bottom right every 10 mins while running through the world. Also most of the time game objects and buildings won't appear until I'm about 5-10 meters away from them. As well as slow loading textures, sometimes the textures will remain ugly and low res and finally load up 2 minutes after I've been in the area. And other times, sections of the world just won't load and I'll fall right through the ground.

What could be the problem? The game runs perfectly fine on medium-high settings at a constant 60 FPS when it's not having these freezing problems (which is often). My assumption is an old or dying hard drive, I'm using a 5200RPM green label WD drive, maybe it's too slow? I get these same issues with games like Arkham Knight, GTAV, and Witcher 3. So I know it's not the game's fault. I'm just here to confirm my suspicions and maybe get some suggestions.

My specs:

Windows 7

Nvidia Geforce GTX 960

AMD FX 6300 6-core

GSkill Ripjaw Series 8GB DDR

WD10EADX 1TB SATA HDD