What is wrong with this hdd?

Hi,
I bought new Dell E4300 with 7200 rpm harddisk. Notebook is nice except one problem I have - every 2 seconds or more (this differes a lot on resources usage) movies or music stops playing for a very short time ... simply said playing isn't smooth.
I think it could be a HDD problem so I run HDTune benchmark.
Here is the result ... while I didn't make 15 posts I can't post a link (!@#$@$@#) anyway I think the result shouldn't look like this:

unitedstatesof.net/temp/HDTune_Benchmark_ST9160411ASG.png

Almost in every low point of the graph the video or music stopped playing for a very short time (300-600ms) and that is very annoying.
I think it could be a hdd problem or maybe CPU problem that affects the hdd results as well, because the mouse pointer also stops moving for a while.

Do you have any ideas what the problem could be?

 

Look for processes running in the background
Look for resource hungry start-up programs
If using WMP try a different player
Here is is link to media player classic

http://sourceforge.net/project/down...lename=mplayerc_20081005.zip&use_mirror=voxel


Alex

 

Run Task Manager > Performance tab > Monitor CPU usage, and check processes for high resource usage in the Processes tab.

On the same Performance page, click on Resource Monitor > Disk > Click on Read or Write > Check the Image/File with the highest activity and terminate that.

Its most likely a background virus-scan, or search indexes are being built or the background defagger working, that are constantly reading/writing to the HDD.

 

The thing is that there is nothing like that. No indexing service, nothing reading from HDD (except HDTune) and when I run the HDTune, then it happens that every 1 or 2 seconds the mouse get stuck etc a nd I think that shouldn't happen. It's very annoying to work and the music and mouse pointer stucks regularly.
Btw. it's completely new installed Vista.

 

Vista does act weird when newly installed, as it monitor's user activity, and the Superfetch thing and all that, to cache the apps you run often.

Monitoring the resource usage is the only way you'll come to know what is accessing the HDD, and causing the fairly high CPU usage. (Task Manager and Resource Monitor are your friends, keep monitoring when doing stuff)

 

I agree with Andy
You have to find out whats running when the hd is only getting 2.8mb/sec
I don't think is a hardware problem

Alex

 

Yeah, I run performance monitor on administrator level, but all other threads are sleeping :] Anyway I'll try to run HDTune in Vista's safe mode because then there should be minimum processes running and if the problem will be still there I'll install Windows XP on other partition and see if HDTune gives me the same results there.

Anyway txs guys.

 

It does look like a software problem, but I didn't find any solution (indexing services, superfetch, AV etc...)... In fact I have sent back my E4300

 

Did you sent it back for a repair or you don't want the notebook anymore?

 

Now I have a macbook