Diagnosing a slow/hitching pc

[VERTIGGO]

This has bugged me for ever, but is there no way to just find out what the pc is doing ATM?

I'm running my Core2 Quad rig in sig, windows is freshly installed on a 32GB SSD, and the only thing I can think of is the fact that I have about 10 HDDs and some are in a RAID 5 setup.

When diagnosing, after you've reinstalled, updated, and culled windows of junk, defragged all drives, removed prefetching (necessary for SSDs), scanned for latent virii, benched to make sure the HDDs are all running at full tilt, and ensured through taskmanager that the CPU is <1% busy...

...how do you determine what is making the pc hitch?

It's usually when browsing windows explorer or Firefox, but the pc will become less responsive, or characters appear slowly while typing, but I quickly check taskmanager and nothing seems to be loading it. Where else do you look, in general?

 

[AFurryReptile]

Are all of your drivers up to date? I can imagine you might need to update your motherboard bios to fully support that many hard drives. Being that it's a Dell I can totally see this being the problem.

You may also try installing an OS on a single hard drive, and booting from only that, to see if the problem persists. At least that way you'll know if it's a hardware or a software issue.

 

[VERTIGGO]

The only Dell hardware I have is the monitor, and yes whenever I reinstall windows, I update everything down to the BIOS. I'm pretty sure it performs well when only one HDD is attached (boot disk), but that's not a solution, since I need my storage space 😉

I've heard rumors about terabyte partitions being too large, causing lag, and I have a 4.5 TB partition at the moment (RAID 5), but I've also heard just as much about how that's nonsense...