hard drive stutters ruining online gaming help??

[nx02nx02]

I play games online with my computer and it runs them fairly well. I get good framerates but for some reason every few seconds my hard drive will access for just a second, i can hear it making noise and the hdd led light comes on just for a split second. It makes the game pause for a split second and then goes smooth again. It seems like it does this atleast every 30 seconds or so. This is ruining my online gaming. I play games like desert combat and lock on and many others. These hard drive spikes are causing me to lose, crash my plane or helo, get shot and just driving me crazy.

Any ideas? How can I make this hard drive shut up and not access while im playing games?
It's not the games fault, it does it in every game and it's even doing it while I type this. I guess it does it all the time when my computers on. It has done this ever since I have had this hard drive and I cant figure it out. My other computer with a WD doesn't do it. Is this hard drive just defective? or is there some settings or something I can change?
I have also tried doing a fresh install of xp and 2000 and installing nothing but drivers and 1 game and it still does it, singleplayer or multiplayer. This is with winxp's default 17 processes running and nothing running in the background. Is this normal for maxtor hard drives?

SYSTEM SPECS:

MAXTOR DIAMONDMAX PLUS 9 80 GIG 8 MB CACHE

Athlon XP 2000+

MSI K7N2

Geforce 4 TI4400 56.72

350 Watt power supply

512 PNY PC2100

WINXP pro fresh install

 

[Cheetah8799]

you need more ram. Lots of the newest games require more than 512mb, otherwise they start using virtual memory (your hard drive) instead of the ram.

Edit: You could probably get by with an extra 256mb, but most people go straight to 1gb.

 

[imported_raybay]

Insiufficient, unreliable, or inadequate RAM

 

[daveybrat]

actually, i had the EXACT same problem as you describe, and the hard drive in my gaming computer was a Maxtor 80GB 8MB cache drive. Every once in a while, though not as often as you it would stutter in a game as it would access out of the blue.
I had 512MB of ram (it's all in my sig below) so i knew that wasn't it.

but to make a long story short, i didn't like the noise of the drive anyhow, so i bought a
seagate 80GB 8MB cache and guess what? Not 1 problem with this new drive since i've had it
and it's quiet as a mouse. I love seagate drives

 

[Frito]

While RAM would help. This problem is caused from the Hard drive trying to use more of the IDE controller than it has rights to and interferring with the CD/DVD drives status check.

Here's what you should do to optimize your system.

Put your Primary HD on one IDE controller. And if it's a Western Digital Set the Jumper to "Single" setting. letting it know it's the only drive on the controller. Then put your DVD/CD drives on the secondary controller with the proper Master/Slave settings.

Also, make sure the two controllers (Primary/Secondary) aren't sharing an IRQ. You can usually change that in the "Integrated Peripherals" Section in your BIOS.

 

[huesmann]

Also make sure you don't have any disk-accessing s/w running in background, like AV s/w.