HDD acting strange.

[HaakonXCI]

My HDD has been acting strange lately. While I'm playing Battlefield 3, the gun models would stop loading for 10 seconds and then I'd get a hard lockup. After I flip the power switch to get it to shutdown and reboot, I get a disk read error over and over. Now I'm thinking that the HDD really did die. So for one last attempt at salvaging, I turn off the power, open it up and switch the connection to another SATA port on the motherboard and boot again. This time it boots fine.

And it was fine for a day or 2 until it randomly did it again the same way on the same game. So I plug the SATA cable back into the first port again and it's fine once more. I've had no issues again for another day until last night when anything I did would cause it to freeze for 1-4 minutes. Luckily I had a few seconds to open up the resource manager and as it came up, everything looked normal except for spiking on the blue graph line and I slowly watched all of the IO operation dwindle down to just the pagefile and then even that disappeared and came back minutes later. Then after 3 minutes of waiting, the computer came back from instability and all IO operations were up and running and the spiking stopped.

I ran chkdsk on a boot once and after checking for about 4 hours it showed 0 errors. I then ran memtest86+ overnight for 11 hours and all tests were completed with 0 errors.

So what's going on here if it's showing no problems?

I'm using:
Windows 7 64bit
Intel C2Q 6600 @ 3ghz
4GB (2x2gb) DDR2 Corsair
460GTX 1GB Hawk
950w Rosewill PSU
-
1TB WD Black Caviar 7200rpm (the problem one)
320GB Seagate Barracuda 7200rpm

 

[aicom]

Try running CrystalDiskInfo and see what it says about your disk health.

 

[foscooter]

Have you installed the latest chipset drivers for your motherboard? Especially the SATA controller drivers?

There is another thread in here about almost the same thing I was involved with.

 

[HaakonXCI]

Have you installed the latest chipset drivers for your motherboard? Especially the SATA controller drivers?

There is another thread in here about almost the same thing I was involved with.

Yes, and I just reinstalled them for safe measure. I'm using an EVGA 780i on the 15.58 drivers.

I also ran that CrystalDiskInfo program and here's a screenshot:

 

[aicom]

I'd backup your data immediately and replace/RMA the drive.

 

[HaakonXCI]

Well I guess I'll just replace it then. Thanks.

 

[Paperdoc]

You have had two situations in which you "fixed" your HDD by moving the SATA data cable. Maybe the problem is that the cable connectors are loose, and moving it temporarily gives you a good connection which later fails. Try a new SATA data cable. If you don't have a locking type of cable, consider getting some. They eliminate the problem of data cables working themselves free by their own weight.