I am experiencing the same issue. Although the freezes are normally 10-30 seconds, which is troublesome enough, they can sometimes last up to two minutes. In every case, Highest Active Time holds at 100% and I/O at 0KB/s, and whenever the HAT drops back to 0% (typically for <1 second), the I/O spikes to catch up with whatever commands were issued during the pause, yet the HAT then rockets back up.
CPU activity never rises over 40% during this period, even if I'm running Prime95. RAM usage remains steady, usually at 30-40%.
Effectively, nothing that requires anything of the HDD will respond whilst HAT=100%. The cursor is responsive, and Windows Aero effects continue, but otherwise the system is frozen until the HAT drops.
Also, the issue survives forced restarts. If the system is restarted whilst the freezes are occurring, they will continue to occur even at the 'Starting Windows' loading screen, which can therefore take more than half an hour to finish, given the brief windows of activity the system is allowed.
So far, I have:
1. Run 10 passes of Memtest86+ without errors.
2. Run ChkDsk at least four times without errors.
3. Reformatted the primary hard drive and reinstalled Windows 7.
The issue appears to occur at random—whether I'm rendering, video editing, web browsing, gaming, or just typing into Notepad, it occurs just as frequently. Stress doesn't appear to matter.
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