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Suspect HDD
RT800
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Been trying to figure this out on my own for a while now but can't seem to find a fix, so I thought I'd try my luck here.
I recently purchased a new computer. Everything was fine for a while, but lately I've noticed that oftentimes while playing a game or watching a movie, I get little one to two second 'hiccups', during which time the frame rate drops and the game or video stutters.
I began to suspect the hard drive was the culprit, so I monitored its activity in the task manager and sure enough, each 'hiccup' was accompanied by a significant spike in HDD active time.
I ran Windows 8's error-checking tool, but it says no errors have been found. I also ran CHKDSK from the command prompt, but again, no errors found. I tried defragmenting the HDD, but Windows says it's unnecessary.
I know it's no guarantee against failure, but this HDD is less than a year old and I'd hate to think that it's already on its way out.
Does anyone here have any idea what could be causing this behavior?
I recently purchased a new computer. Everything was fine for a while, but lately I've noticed that oftentimes while playing a game or watching a movie, I get little one to two second 'hiccups', during which time the frame rate drops and the game or video stutters.
I began to suspect the hard drive was the culprit, so I monitored its activity in the task manager and sure enough, each 'hiccup' was accompanied by a significant spike in HDD active time.
I ran Windows 8's error-checking tool, but it says no errors have been found. I also ran CHKDSK from the command prompt, but again, no errors found. I tried defragmenting the HDD, but Windows says it's unnecessary.
I know it's no guarantee against failure, but this HDD is less than a year old and I'd hate to think that it's already on its way out.
Does anyone here have any idea what could be causing this behavior?
RT800 on
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This would be my first bet as well.
Instead of task manager, run the resource monitor (resmon.exe, or the Open Resource Monitor link at the bottom of the Performance tab of taskmgr). When the hiccup happens, you should be able to see what program(s) caused it, because they'll spike in read or write activity. If it's explorer.exe suddenly doing a lot of reads, there's a chance it might be the hard drive (it'll hit an error and retry the file - if the drive's not too far gone it'll usually succeed before giving you an error, but it can still deadlock the computer briefly). But other possible causes are the crappy support programs many manufacturers stuff onto their computers, crappy antivirus software (or even good antivirus software conflicting with something, this can be a nightmare to figure out and sometimes the solution is just to switch anyway), all kinds of spyware or browser add-ons, some unnecessary "optimization" software.
The drive being only a year old doesn't mean a whole lot, sadly. Hard drives are fickle bitches - they have a non trivial failure right right out of the box, and they seem just as likely to roll over and die the first week as they are any given week years later.