Hard drive using 100% CPU time?

Duffman

OK, this is a weird one and it has been driving me mad. I'm out of ideas.

I have a Dell D600 laptop with a standard IDE hard drive, Pentium M 1.3ghz and 512mb RAM. For the past couple of weeks I've been experiencing a really annoying issue. I get systems lockups frequently, mostly when running utorrent or playing mp3 files. When the torrent client is reading/writing to disk the systems slows to a crawl and mp3 playback stutters almost all the time, regardless of the player I use and, oddly, even if the system is doing pretty much nothing else at the time.

I'm pretty sure it's a hardware issue because I get stuttering when playing mp3 files from disk under linux too.

I bit of investigation with task manager often shows 100% CPU usage during the slowdown but it doesn't attribute it to any process. What I mean is that the sum of processor time in the process list is never 100%, everything looks normal except for the fact that total CPU usage is 100%.

It looks like the problems happens during any kind of sustained disk access. The disk itself seems healthy, at least SMART data reports that it's fine.

Any ideas? Thanks.

Ruu_Old

Did you try the usual anti-virus and anti-spyware scans? Which media player are you using for your MP3s?

Saruman

You are sure that no single process is using a lot? That does seem odd.
Anyway check out event manager and look at the system events... if you see a load red saying disk error then yes there is in fact a problem.

Duffman

Thanks for the replies.

@Ruu, I ran scans just be safe but I'm fairly sure it's something hardware related. Media player is usually iTunes but I see the same issue (although not as much) using gnome rhythmbox under linux.

@Saruman, just checked the logs but there doesn't seem to be anything there. Just the usual stuff logging services stopping and starting.

'Tis odd indeed..

Snowbat

In Linux, what do you get from the following command? (run as root or use sudo):

hdparm -tTI /dev/hda

Capt'n Midnight

power settings in the BIOS

in windows what happens if you disable the swap file / set to 0 ?

is the drive making funny noises - a surface scan to be on the safe side

easy guv'nor

Gonna resurrect this thread from the dead - Have the almost the exact same problem, maybe not as bad as the OP (system doesn't lock up, just everything much slower than I'm used to).

Also have the same hardware - Dell D600, 512mb, but I've got a 1.4GHz chip. Snap.

I think this started when I started connecting to smart BB thru my old netopia 3347w router.

Was considering just maxing out the RAM and getting a new HDD for the system.

Captain, gonna try disabling the paging file now. Suspected the HDD might be knackered but never thought of that.

Khannie

maybe DMA is disabled. Have a google for enabling it on windows. I can't remember how I'm afraid.

Duffman

Yep, I discovered that my problem was DMA also. XP has some stupid feature where it will revert to PIO mode if if encounters a certain number of disk errors.

Go to the device manager in windows and find "Primary IDE channel" - delete that and reboot.

Windows will reinstall the device with DMA enabled.

easy guv'nor

thanks guys - my problem was dma too. Proccessor usage back to normal now.

Altough have been getting signs that the HDD is about to go so probably just trade up anyway.