Barracuda XT, Barracuda, Barracuda Green, DiamondMax and other desktop SATA and IDE drives

[vistafreeze]

Hi,

so after having built my own system about a year ago and getting tired of the OS freezing randomly on me, I decided to look for suspects. The hard drive is an obvious one. When I log all the registry and file accesses in Process Monitor, absolutely nothing happens for the approx. 2 minutes Vista freezes. I can move my mouse but that's it. The hard drive LED is solid red for these 2 minutes. Then all of a sudden it starts working again and I can hear the HD work like mad for a couple seconds to handle all the requests which queued up for the past 2 minutes.

My system:

Vista SP1 with all lastest patches and whatnot

Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST3500320AS 500GB w/ SD15 firmware

So..... since it's not the same problem most people here are experiencing (which seems to be HD = brick), what I want to know is: did this behavior happen to anyone else? Does SD1A firmware address this?

[Hamartolos]

No fun.

When it freezes up like that, can you hit Control + Alt + Delete and see what the Task Manager is doing, like what the Processor is doing?  Like, is it running near 100%, etc?

Run checkdisk, defrag, and Seatools for Windows also.

[Konowl]

What are you doing when it freezes?  I have a very similar problem with my setup right now - the issue crops up when I try to copy a file to/from my 1.5 tb from my 500 gig drive - both Seagates with latest firmwares.  Looking around, this is a known problem but I haven't been able to find a solution.

[mechad]

my ST3750330AS using firmware SD15 started exibiting these symptoms shortly before it becamre completely unreadable... Vista hibernate seems to exacerbate things as well. Anyways i would back up your drive as soon as possible, when you start messing with the drive to make it faster the drive could fail.

[anti]

If there's even a slight possibility of the previous posters warning then you should immediately back up all important data.

Could be firmware but it could be Vista bugging up...A fresh install would eliminate one of those suspects.

[vistafreeze]

Thanks for the replies peeps

To Hamartolos: ctrl+alt+del doesn't work. Everything is unresponsive except for the mouse, I can still move it around. Of course I can't click on anything as the "hourglass" animation is displayed. I ran scandisk and defrag regularly, but I'll try Seatools out.

To Konowl: I could be doing anything that accesses the HD really. I'd say 90% of the time either me or my wife are browsing, so 90% of the freezes happen when browsing.

To mecha: thanks for sharing your experience. I backed up everything I couldn't live without (pictures, music, documents) on my laptop. If the HD crashes and burns, I can RMA it and reinstall Vista and all the apps little by little. I just don't want to lose my camera pictures and mp3s as I've spent countless hours ripping my entire CD collection. Even if Seagate sends me a replacement, I don't know that I could trust it enough to install the OS on it a second time..... sad really.