Is my hard drive causing my system to freeze up?

[cnguyen]

Hey guys, just got a 1Tb Toshiba 7200rpm drive for my new build. Things were going well for a couple of days until i noticed that my system started to freeze up every now and then. Things would go back to normal after 30secs or so. When this problem got worse, I ran some test on all of my components, prime95, memtest86, hdtune (on safe mode), etc. From the tests, I deduced that my cpu (fx6300) was fine as well as my ram (crucial ballistix 8gb 1600mhz). However, my benchmarks for the hard drive showed some funny dips that would go all the way down to 4.6mb/s from 200ish. Wondering if this is causing all the trouble? If not could it be my mobo? Or maybe the psu is not good enough (inland gold 500w).

 

[dmitche3]

I've been suffering from possibly a similar issue, so I'm going to watch this thread. I added a second drive (WD) and the machine pretty much stops at times until a few minutes goes by and continues on with throughput on both drives varying. I've never found a solution on the web but I've speculated that my MB was the issue and not the drive. IDK though. As my problems are when copying a lot of large files (300MB to 2GB). Defragging appears to help but only for a short period of time. Try defragging but don't bet the farm on that( if running Windows).

 

[spawnkiller]

was happening on my last rig with Caviar blue in raid 1, 1 minute freezes and then all ok again... a RAID controller update solve this problem for me and when i had change for the config i have now, no problem so it's surely your SATA controller that need some update or have a bug...

 

[cnguyen]

by the way, im getting a cpu usage of -1%. How is this even possible?

 

[dmitche3]

Not sure how that would be displayed even. Responding to my own post I figured out my problem with the stopping or pausing, the Seagate drive was bad. I replaced it with a new WD and all of my mysteries of slow copying disappeared. I hate Seagate drives as the SMART utils show a bunch of crap that every one tells you is normal or okay but no one really knows for sure.

I had to totally remove the Seagate drive. Simply not using it was causing problems by just being on the system.