Just added new HDD and system is stuttering

[spotpuff]

I recently got a 74GB raptor. I cloned my OS/apps to the raptor and left my other drive as a data drive.

However, for some reason my system will stutter every once in a while. I first noticed it while playing WOW but it happens all the time. Even if I'm just at the desktop playing an MP3 in winamp, it will stutter. Playing a video file in Media Player Classic results in the same thing.

It's not just audio stuttering; while playing WOW, the game will "freeze" for a split second and then will resume.

This didn't happen before when I just had 1 HDD.

I checked under device manager and turned off NCQ, tried swapping SATA ports, tried disconnecting the 2nd drive and running just the raptor, but the result is the same. I've also tried reinstalling the NForce audio drivers, but again, same thing.

Any ideas on what could cause this or how to fix it? Also, I noticed the drive was making random "clicking" noises it seemed, I couldn't really pinpoint it to one of the drives. After running the computer without the 2nd drive and then plugging it back in again, the clicking seems to have stopped. I hope the drive isn't dying but chkdsk and SMART both seem to think the drive is doing fine.

Suggestions?

[ryan_975]

sounds like the Raptor is stalling while transferring data for some reason, might want to download some HDD diagnostics and run the most enhanced comprehensive test available. Could be having trouble reading from the platters causing it to retry a few times.

Ryan

[spotpuff]

The weird thing is the hard drive isn't really being accessed when any of this is going on; no HDD light activity at all.

I will run the diagnostics when I get home; maybe the extended one overnight but yeah, very worrisome.

[spotpuff]

After a few hours of awesome testing which said everything was ok and reinstalling drivers, I just uninstalled the NVidia SW IDE drivers and no more stuttering.

Unfortunately in the future I plan on running RAID 1 which requires the NVidia SW IDE drivers, so, that's not really good news for me.

Anyone else ever have problems with system stuttering with the Nvidia SW IDE drivers installed? Seems dumb to me that the default MS drivers work better than the Nvidia ones; Nvidia's platform driver support has been terrible as of late anyways. Most drivers haven't been updated in half a year, going on longer, like the NForce4 AMD drivers. :T

[Sinclair]

From what your describing it sounds like the entire machine just pauses then picks up right where it left a few seconds later? If so, I've had this as well, seemed to go away when I took everything off my SATA ports and disabled them (NF3) and ran a mirror on a promise card and the OS off my SCSI. Came back when I went from the SCSI to a Raptor as a boot with the onboard SATA. Changed some things around during the week and haven't had the issue pop back up yet *knock on wood*, but the next time it does, I'll have to try removing the nvidia IDE drivers before I ditch the onboard entirely.

[spotpuff]

Well, as I mentioned, if I remove the Nvidia SW IDE driver everything runs just fine.

The only issue is if you want to run NVRAID you NEED to have the SW IDE driver installed :T

Crud.