Possible HDD problem

Mister Man

Hi all,

I have been suing my PC now for around 14 months. Here is it's specs:

Radeon HD 6850 - 1GB
AMD Phenom II X4 840 - 3.2GHz
Cooler Master Hyper TX3
Corsair XMS3 - 2 x 2GB
MSI 870U-G55
Advance MPT-6500 PC Power Unit - 600Watt
AEROCOOL Strike X PC Tower Case - I thought it looked cool......lol
Samsung SpinPoint F3 - 1TB (No partitions)
80GB Seagate Barracuda (OS installed)
320GB external HDD (General crap)

Now, since I got the PC up and running, I've noticed that the HDD (I believe it's the Samsung) will stop spinning altogether, and will then begin to spin again, and load data from the drive. (That's all a guess really, it's what it sounds like anyway) When this happens, I can't do anything apart from move my cursor. I can't click or anything until the sound stops.

Now I use my PC for Photoshop/Illustrator/etc Nothing ever slows it down, other then the HDD problem.

I looked it up when I got the system running and it happened a few times, it said something about HDD partitions, I never got around to doing it.

Now lately, it's been really annoying me, it hasn't become worse or better, but I would really like to get this sorted. Do you think partitioning the drive will help? I haven't tried it, because I don't want to erase everything on my drive to do this, if it isn't going to help.

Thanks for any help

FSL

It sounds like a hardware problem with the disk. I would back up any data you have and then run diagnostics on the disk. You can get a set of disk diagnostic tools from the Seagate web site.

Partitioning the disk won't solve a hardware problem.

If it is a hardware problem the disk will still be under warranty.

Mister Man

Cheers for the reply. I scanned the two internal drives and found nothing! Although, saying that, it hasn't done anything in the past hour or two.! Very odd!

Mister Man

I take that back, it's still doing it

Mister Man

Anyone else got any idea how to fix this.?

fionny

Some of the more modern "eco" drives are really quite slow. It shouldnt really stop if its the drive windows is on though. They also stop spinning to save power and can take a few seconds to spin up again which is exacly what it sounds like yours is doing.

Razzuh

Do the two drives show up as separate drives in windows (e.g. c: and d:) or are they set up to be treated as if they were just one (so you'd only have c: I guess). I'd be surprised if that was the case, but it would explain the problem.

The first thing I'd try anyway would be to have a look at the any power saving options. Look for the time a drive will be powered down after if it's left idle, and increase it. See if this helps.

T-Bird

I would go along the same line as FSL posted.

It could also be power managment in control panel switching drives off, if unused after a set period. If it is you can increase the time.

Control Panel\All Control Panel Items\Power Options\Edit Plan Settings
then click change advanced power settings and sellect hard disk option there.