System Stuttering when Hard Drive Spins Up

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

are you sure that the drive is not dying?

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

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…

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.

was the video on the drive that was spinning up?

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