Hard Drive Spin Up Delay causes Freezing

[Eggroll822]

I have 2 Hitachi SATA HDs installed on my computer running 32bit Vista Business. Windows installation is HD1, World of Warcraft installation is on HD2. Randomly while playing WoW I can hear HD2 spinning up and during that process my WoW game window would freeze up for 2-3 seconds then it would resume normal play.

Does anyone have any idea would the HD is doing a spin up out of nowhere? Any suggestions to fix the issue is much appreciated.

 

[imported_wired247]

power settings in windows: tell hard drives never to power down

 

[Eggroll822]

Thank you very much for the help.

 

[hoverdonkey]

Video playback & timeshifting TV playback (in Media Portal) would freeze whilst hard disks would be heard spinning up. Play would resume after around 20 seconds.

Sound would sometimes carry on. This would occur perhaps twice an hour. Video tearing was alo a problem during this time.

At the time I had Windows Aero disabled (in the belief that I was freeing up system resources). However, I read somewhere that disabling Aero could actually cause

problems with video.

In hindsight, I should have just turned Aero back on to test, but I did a wider ranging cleanout operation instead. On other words, having Aero disabled is prime

suspect, it was never proved.

Anyway, the problem WAS fixed after the following;

CLEANUP;

all spurious apps uninstalled
MediaPortal complete uninstall
SAF codec pack uninstalled
ATI drivers unsinstalled
ATI drivers clenaed up with Driversweep utility

REINSTALL;
latest ATI drivers resinstalled (Catalyst 10.8)
Windows Aero enabled
SAF4 installed
MP 1.1 final installed


Relevant gear;

OS - Windows 7 64 bit
Motherboard - GIGA byte GA-MA78GM-S2H Rev 1.0(AMD 780G chipset, with HD 3200 integrated graphics)
CPU - AMD 4850e
RAM - 2GB PC6400, 512MB assigned to integretaed graphics
1 system HDD and 2 data HDDs installed