How to find intermittent hard drive bottleneck?

[Mulet]

Hey,

I'm having some issues with intermittent slowdown on my PC. It's setup for games development, so I'm using Visual Studio 2010 95% of the time when I encounter the problem.

The entire pc lags, mouse stutters and everything takes about 5-20 seconds to respond. Performance monitor tells me my HD usage is spiking to max.

So my question is this, what application can I run in the background to give me a report of what's eating up what resource during the day?

Note: Quick answer would be "buy an SSD". Reply to that is "Did, it died." It was a 120gb vertex 2. Blue screen, then the HDD just showed a little red LED and no longer is recognized by any of the 4 PC's I tried internally, and also via 2 HDD readers. Saving for another now.

Bonus question: How can I bring a Vertex 2 back from the grave?


System:
Windows 7 Pro x64
16Gb ram
i5 750 2.5ghz
Radeon HD 6700 (display 1 and 2)
Nvidia GT 220
750gb 7600 rpm

 

[ngrego]

(off topic) Did you get a replacement for your SSD? How long did it last? You know you can RMA it and OCZ will send you a replacement.

 

[Mulet]

Lasted about 7 months, but I don't really want to send it off. I neglected to keep full system backups. I keep the highly valuable code and documents in remote repositories, but not the personal stuff, and misc items. Like screenshots, performance reports etc...

So I'd rather hold out for way to fix the bastard.

 

[ngrego]

There is a process pointed out by ocz to attempt to revive a dead Vertex 2. You're supposed to reset cmos, remove battery, leave for 1 hour without battery, then reinstall battery and start pc. None of that works (at least it didn't for me) then they tell you to RMA the drive. I also read a post in OCZ for forum where someone actually sent the drive to a data recovery firm but had no luck there either.
I personally returned mine after a week and the replacement after like 10 days, finally they offered an Agility 3 which has been workin fine since.

This all very disapointing stuff especially when you have lost important data!
Good luck with your ssd, I hope you get your data back!

 

[aqe040466]

Hey,

I'm having some issues with intermittent slowdown on my PC. It's setup for games development, so I'm using Visual Studio 2010 95% of the time when I encounter the problem.

The entire pc lags, mouse stutters and everything takes about 5-20 seconds to respond. Performance monitor tells me my HD usage is spiking to max.

So my question is this, what application can I run in the background to give me a report of what's eating up what resource during the day?

Note: Quick answer would be "buy an SSD". Reply to that is "Did, it died." It was a 120gb vertex 2. Blue screen, then the HDD just showed a little red LED and no longer is recognized by any of the 4 PC's I tried internally, and also via 2 HDD readers. Saving for another now.

Bonus question: How can I bring a Vertex 2 back from the grave?


System:
Windows 7 Pro x64
16Gb ram
i5 750 2.5ghz
Radeon HD 6700 (display 1 and 2)
Nvidia GT 220
750gb 7600 rpm

5-20 sec to respond could be a memory problem, download and run "memtest86", it will show you if the RAM sticks are still okay. For the HDD, you can download and run "crystaldiskinfo" application if you want to know the health of the HDD