hard drive stutters ruining online gaming help??

[mx1mx1]

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

[Philip]

Have you turned off the indexing service?

[dandragonrage]

I've had and seen Maxtor drives screw up in such a way that they simply start going really slow. I had a 40GB that benchmarked under 1MB/sec constantly.

Of course, disable extra services, delete extra crap, defrag and all that. You can run diagnostic programs like on the disk that came with it or the ultimate boot CD to see if there is a problem with it first. You may get lucky and find a simple fix. You may have a bad drive. Note: such a problem may not be detected by the diagnostic tools. Mine was not. I fixed it by getting a WD drive. Hopefully, you will not need to do that.

[mx1mx1]

How do i turn off the indexing service?

[plur]

I used to have the exact same drive; the 8MB cache made me get it. Prolly the slowest drive I've ever owned. The 120GB drives are much faster, however.

To disable the indexing service, fire up a command prompt (start > run > "cmd") and type the following exactly:

net stop "Indexing Service"

[Snugglebear]

Depending on the game there's a very real possibility you've exhausted your memory and are paging.

[Ice Czar]

How do i turn off the indexing service?

Start > Run > (type) compmgmt.msc > Services & Applications > Indexing Service > Directories > DClick each entry > Include in Index > No > OK

Navigate up the tree to > Services > Indexing Service > DClick > General Tab > Startup Type > Disabled

Depending on the game there's a very real possibility you've exhausted your memory and are paging.

and more memory would be a good idea
if you have more than one HDD you can employ multiple pagefiles to effectively RAID them

MultiplePage Files (http://faq.storagereview.com/tiki-index.php?page=MultiplePagefiles) (note the cautions regarding access)
Optimizing the paging file (http://www.windowsitlibrary.com/Content/435/07/9.html)
Virtual Memory in XP (http://aumha.org/win5/a/xpvm.php)

and finally when was the last time you defragmented?
Partitioning Strategies (http://partition.radified.com/#ggviewer-offsite-nav-12464504) @ Radified
specifically page 2 Advantages of Multi-Partition Drives


your game should be loading into memory
and the disk should be rarely accessed after that
if its paging to the virtual memory, regardless of how fast the HDD is, or how optimized the Virtual Memory, its probably still going to be a problem
HDD access is several orders slower than RAM access ;)

[Snugglebear]

your game should be loading into memory
and the disk should be rarely accessed after that
if its paging to the virtual memory, regardless of how fast the HDD is, or how optimized the Virtual Memory, its probably still going to be a problem
HDD access is several orders slower than RAM access ;)

Many games have fairly thorough logging for replays and statistical analysis. Periodically you need to flush those logs to disk even if memory is plentiful enough to contain the entire logfile.

As for HDD access vs. RAM, the old rule of thumb is such: If looking up a piece of data in RAM takes as long as picking up a book, checking the index, then flipping to a page, looking up a piece of data on the HDD would take you two years.