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Four out of five hard drives slow, clicking
I appreciate any help. Thanks.
My computer has five hard drives. The system drive is fast and quiet. All other drives click when starting (initial boot, wake), stopping (shut down, sleep), and intermittently during use. They don’t click while not in use. During the clicking, read/write stops, putting whatever I’m doing on hold for several seconds. Setting hard drives to go never go to sleep on their own had no impact.
The hard drive models are:
• Hitachi Deskstar, 1TB, 7200RPM, SATA III, 32MB Cache (system drive)
• Hitachi Deskstar, 2TB, 7200RPM, SATA III, 64MB Cache (x2: scratch data, including page file; second unused)
• Seagate Barracuda, 2TB, 7200RPM, SATA III, 64 MB Cache (x2: RAID 1, storage)
The Hitachi 2TB drives actually make a chirping sound before clicking. Since this is impacting more than one brand and four drives total, I think I can rule out hardware failure. Also, I tried a variety of hardware tests and no problems were ever found (including SeaTools, Intel Rapid Storage Technology verification, Checkdisk). I had initially set up the Hitachi 2TB drives as my RAID 1 storage volume, and they were chirp-clicking in that setup as well. None of the hard drives came with a jumper, though research suggests that having one on would either just slow down the data transfer rate or reduce the capacity.
All hard drives are connected to SATA 2 ports. This is a custom build, based largely on Videoguys DIY8 Budget. Operating system is Windows 7 Professional 64 bit. Motherboard is ASUS P6X58-E Pro. CPU is Intel Core i7-950. GPU is EVGA GeForece GTX 570. RAM is G.Skill Ripjaws 16 GB (4x4). Also installed are: Hauppage 1199 WinTV tuner, BD burner, DVD burner, and an internal USB memory card reader. Hijackthis log is attached, run immediately after a normal boot.
I doubt this matters, but just in case, at one point I installed a USB emulator which is supposed to trick the GPU into thinking a separate IR transmitter for 3d glasses is plugged in, thus allowing the 3d monitor to use its built-in IR transmitter. I couldn’t get it to work. Around the same time, I started getting notifications in the system tray that a USB device is not recognized. Uninstalling the driver has no impact; it just comes back on the next boot.
Also probably not related: Immediately after I installed the Seagate drives (I was already having problems with the 2TB Hitachis), the system became very unstable. After approximately an hour, one of the 8 CPU threads would be at 100%, with the others around 0%, and I could barely move the mouse cursor. I think I resolved this by manually updating the storage controller drivers for Marvell 91xx SATA 6G Controller and JMicron JMB36X Controller. (Windows had thought they were already current.) I might have also updated Intel SATA RAID Controller, I’m not sure. But like I said, I highly doubt this has any relation since the clicking happened both before and after.
HJT log removed as we rarely use it and then only for malware analysis in the Virus, Trojan, Spyware, and Malware Removal Logs forum. ~ OB
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