Random Freeze and Click

[afortiori]

Firstly, the usual specs:

i7 950 OC'd to 4.0GHz
Gigabyte X58-USB3
Sapphire HD6870
Corsair XMS3 6GB
Currently 4 HDD's:
250GB, 2x320GB, 1TB

When the HDDs are accessing data, such as when playing video (VLC) or music (winamp) files, the audio and/or video freezes completely. This occurs for approximately 3-4 seconds at any time during the video or audio, and then everything returns to normal following a physical click sound (ie not from the speakers, but from the tower itself). In this 3-4 second window of freezing, attempting to access other files or folders is impossible aswell, but every action I try to perform is then executed once the click has happened and the freeze is over. This is happening several times a day. I am certain that this problem is affecting more than one of my HDDs.

Anyone have any ideas as to what is causing this problem?

 

[tomatthe]

Do you have the drives setup to go to sleep when not in use? It sounds like this is probably some of the unused drives spinning up which will freeze a system exactly as you described until they are spun up. Sometimes Windows will access the drives even if you are directly trying to use them. I would try to disable powering down the drives and see if it explains whats happening, and then you could decide if you wanted to just deal with the freezes occasionally or have them not spin down at all.