[Solved] System Grinds to a Halt During HDD Activity

I've got an Aspire One and I'm running Windows XP that I installed myself. Whenever there is a lot of hard drive activity the whole system will grind to a halt for as long as about 5-7 minutes at the worst of it. "A lot of hard drive activity" can be something as small as loading a webpage or opening a PDF. After booting into windows there's about a one to two minute wait where I can't do anything until it's done thinking.

I've got all the XP drivers as provided by Acer and the issue has been happening since I got the PC. I've used msconfig to remove all unnecessary programs from startup and the freezing will occur while both RAM and CPU usage are less than 10% even. The only indication of activity at all during the freezing is the hard drive activity light, which will turn on solid for the entire time.

Now, I've been using the windows Performance Monitor (Start>run>"perfmon") and taking a look at what could be causing the issue. However, monitoring the "Average Disk Queue Length" shows an average of, generally between 1.5 and 2.5. My friend who has an Asus eeePC with very similar specifications to my own Aspire One has an average disk queue length of around 0.2. Mine can jump up to above 9.0 when loading a 200Mb PDF wheras loading the same file on his computer would almost bring the average up to about 2.0.

According to this Microsoft document: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/146005 under "Suspected Bottleneck: Physical Disk" this could be a sign of a bad hard drive. Now, I understand the document is labeled "Optimizing Windows NT" but I'm guessing that the information should be accurate for XP as well.

I understand the last little bit could go over peoples heads, it goes over mine as to what it really means, but I just wanted to point out that, under basically the same hardware, my PC displays a large difference that I think could be an indication of problems.

I assume these problems lie in the fact that I took the system apart to upgrade the RAM and, in the process, may have messed up the little ribbon cable that connects the SSD to the motherboard. I have a feeling this probably voided my warranty so I'm less than optimistic about sending it in for repair.

So overall I've got a few questions: Has anyone else experienced a similar problem? Could anyone else take a quick look at their Average Disk Queue Length to compare results? Could this be a software thing? If it's determined that it was the hard drive cable, where on earth do I get a replacement cable?

Sorry for being a little long winded.

 

Though I doubt anyone really cares about this, but I (largely) solved the issue I was having.

All I needed to do was format the hard drive with FAT as the file system instead of NTFS. The system still slows down a bit, but it doesn't lock up the whole thing for two minutes when I try and open youTube.

 

Your motherboard to disk data transfer is detecting CRC data flow errors and having to make multiple requests before getting clean data packets. You should replace the cable as you will get future data corruptions and the problem will recurr.