System Stuttering when Hard Drive Spins Up

[13ing]

I’m having a system stuttering problem when my hard drive (WD20EARS) spins up.  The hard drive is being used as a storage drive and whenever it gets accessed after no/little use, the entire system will freeze and all audio/video will stutter.  I can hear the hard drive head start moving.  It will happen will watching videos, listening to music or just accessing the drive with windows explorer.

I thought it may have been a LLC issue, but the problem persists after setting “wdidle3 /d”. I’ve updated all my drivers.  I’ve removed all other drives.  No problem with just my boot drive installed.

The only way to prevent the stuttering is changing the Advance Power Settings > Turn off hard disk after > Never, but this causes the drive to constantly spin at max. speed creating noise (doesn’t this defeat the purpose of a GREEN drive?).

Is there a fix or is this a common issue?

System spec:

e8400

gigabyte ep53-ds3r

hdd0: Corsair F40 SSD

hhd1: WD20EARS

hhd2: WD6400AAKS

Windows 7

[DavidSucesso]

are you sure that the drive is not dying?

[13ing]

I’m hoping not, it’s not even 30 days old.

[freonchill]

test the drive with dlg diag (both long test & smart data)

but if you mean by “shuttering” that your entire maching hangs when you get the drive to “spin-up” then that sounds like the age old problem we used to have in previous versions of windows, like when you put a cd/dvd in and if you clicked on it prior to it spinning-up, your entire system would just hang and sit there like it had locked-up…

[13ing]

The stuttering is very similar to what you’ve described.  Let me give you an example.  If I’m watching a video file on the drive, the computer will freeze, the audio will stutter, I can hear the drive spin up and head unpark. It will last as little as 0.5 secs to up to 5 secs.  Once the drive is up to speed the video will fast forward like it’s trying to catch up to where it should be playing.

I did run dlg and it passed both short and long test.  I’ll try smart data later.

[freonchill]

was the video on the drive that was spinning up?

[13ing]

In that example, yes.  But it happens when the media file is on another drive or online.