Hi,

I have recently bought a SSD and installed it today. It works fine, but now it seems one of my other regular HDDs is giving me problems. Let me explain.

The situation before the SSD:
HDD 1 - 250 GB, Windows 7 installed here,
HDD 2 - 500 GB, just data.

The situation now:
SSD - Clean install of Windows 7,
HDD 1 - 250 GB, Formatted before installing Windows on SSD,
HDD 2 - 500 GB, Didn't touch it.

My plan was to use HDD 1 as another data drive alongside HDD 2. I wiped it clean to get rid of windows and start with an empty drive. The SSD is my main system drive, obviously.


It seems however that Windows has a problem accessing the HDD 1 in some occasions. I didn't really detect a good pattern yet, but here are some symptoms that I see regularly:

1. Playing a video file (eg a movie):
- When the file is stored on HDD 1, the movie will freeze after a couple minutes, no matter which media player I use. It will freeze for about a minute and then continue, and it tries to 'catch up' the lost minute by playing everything really fast.
- When the file is stored on the SSD or on HDD 2, there are no problems.

2. Accessing files via Windows Explorer:
- In Visual Studio I tried to open an existing project. I clicked the 'Open project' link after which the open file dialog is supposed to pop up. Nothing happened for over a minute. In the mean time I tried opening windows explorer manually, nothing happened. After about a minute, suddenly everything "unfroze" and about 6 explorer windows popped up, along with the open file dialog from Visual Studio. The open file dialog happened to point to a location on HDD 1 by default.
- If the open file dialog points (by chance) to a location on SSD or HDD 2, it comes up immediately.

3. Starting a game:
- Game installed on HDD 1. The game takes ages to start, and once it does it hangs while loading. Requires me to kill the process before I can continue.
- Same game installed on HDD 2: no problems.
- I did not try to install it on SSD because I know this particular game does not benefit from it.

4. Accessing files from said game:
- The game is a racing simulation game and it happens to have a feature where you can pick car setup files stored on your system. By chance, these files were located on HDD 1. When I tried to access them (from within the game) the first time, the game froze for about a minute. After this it unfroze, the files were accessible as normal for the rest of the evening.



Everything points to HDD 1 being the culprit, but I have no clue what could cause it. I did have a brief look in the Disk Management and I noticed that this drive was listed as Active. That isn't right, is it? It has no operating system so should not be active... So I corrected that, put the SSD drive as Active (actually, a 100 MB system partition on it which seems to be the default for win7), but after a reboot nothing has changed, the problems remain.


Does anyone know anything else that could cause this? Should I just throw the drive out and learn to live with 250 GB less?
Thanks!