Sata very slow o.O;

[Midnight Dream]

Im not sure what it is, but my primary HDD, a Sata WD 120GB, is going incredibly slow. I mean, its slow enough that when I have something installing in the background or whatnot, my game drops from ~60FPS to ~8FPS. When I go to switch from one program to another, like from a game to my browser, it takes at least 10-15 seconds, something which was not occuring with my previous primary harddrive, a Samsung IDE 40gb.

Any thoughts? I've already checked, it shows to be running in 1.5GB/s mode for the sata, and not PIO. Nothing else seems very obvious. Another thing is that its seeking is very loud. It sounds like a fragmented harddrive in its volume. Something else that is not apparent in my other drives.

[K15]

Is it rattling and grinding away (seeking a lot?) Do the ctrl-alt-del thing and see what program is hogging memory. How much RAM do you have anyhow? If it's not a thrashing problem, back-up right now (just in case).

[Midnight Dream]

1GB of Mushkin Level II Black BH-5. And, its not a thing of just a constant thrashing, its only when I access things, but its very loud when I access things. Like, when I was installing C++ Express, my game went down quite low in the FPS, and it was so sluggish doing anything really.

[K15]

That does sound like a problem. Is it way louder than "normal" drive sounds?

[Midnight Dream]

Yes, much louder. On a scale of 1/10, with 1 being an average "normal" drive sound, this is about a 5 or 6.

[K15]

Get any important, irreplaceable data backed up ASAP. Aside from that, wait for the drive to die, it sounds like that's what it's getting ready to do. What brand, size, age is it?

[dreamtfk]

WD has 3 year warranty's so you should be safe. Thats the main reason I always buy WD drives because they give you no flak if your drive fails. Just give em a CC number they send you the new drive and you send the old one back and the charge is taken back off.

[Midnight Dream]

lol, I dont have a CC. I will just do the thing where I ship the drive, they ship me a new one. I have 2 others in reserve anways. But, im not sure whats up. I think it was just a windows thing or something, cause I formatted the drive once more in Linux, and am installing Gentoo, not a single sound. Working fine.