PC freezes briefly then resumes in Vista x64

Hi

I have just built a new pc everything is new apart from my hard disks (4 of them), Floppy drive and my DVD rewriter:

Intel Core i7 920 OC'ed to 3.6 GHz
Giga-byte EX58-UD5 motherboard
Patriot 6GB 1600 MHz RAM
Sapphire HD 4890 1GB (stock speed)
Hiper 630W Type-M PSU

Western Digital SATA 500GB 16mb (main hard disk)

Storage:

Seagate IDE 80GB (connected to SATA via dongle)
Seagate IDE 120GB
IBM (deskstar?) 60GB

LITE-ON DVD-RW IDE (connected to SATA via dongle)
floppy drive

My problem is that when using the pc whether it be web browing, gaming or whatever it will occasionally freeze for a few seconds then resume giving no error at all. When this happens I can hear the hard drive spin up and click. After it resumes it will continue to hum for a while as if it were spinning. The sound is very similar to that when I boot up initially. After a while it will spin down and quieten down. I'm pretty sure it's the WD drive. I never had a problem with this drive under XP with my old AMD athlon 64 setup.

So far I have tried running memtest to eliminate any possible issue with the RAM and it didn't show any errors. I've changed power management settings so that the hard disk doesn't turn off. Neither of these things have worked.

Hi,

I have the same issue at stock speeds.

Yep I'll try running with just a single drive. I'll report back with my findings.

with just a single drive it works fine. With my main drive and an optical drive it works fine. With my main drive + optical + 2nd hard drive the pc freezes briefly when I access the drive in my computer. I think it's a power issue. When I get time I'll swap the 2nd drive with another one to see if the same thing happens. I doubt I would have two faulty drives.

or it might be problems with the IDE - sata adapter

The thing is I have 3 IDE hard drives and 1 IDE optical drive and just 1 IDE connector on my board. Hence why I'm using an IDE-SATA converter. I think it may be a power issue. I'll have to see if it's the converter that's causing it

hi guys. vista doesn't handle IDE very nicely, so whenever your drive goes to sleep, vista kinda puts it on the backburner so to speak. when the IDE drive is needed, vista is like omg omg i just burnt the beans, and the entire system halts to give attention to the IDE device. i've noticed this isn't the case in any unix/linux OS, just vista (i use 64 on my desktop, i dont know if this issue exists with 32bit but i suspect it does).

just my 2 cents