Computer jitters/stutters

[magneticman]

I really am losing my patience now, ever since I installed another Samsung 500GB hdd (very good, fast drives btw) and created a 1TB RAID0 configuration, i've had this peculiar problem that's basically making my pc jitter and stutter intermittently.

So the mouse cursor will pause on the screen when i'm opening a file or application, then while i'm moving it it will go there after it's back to normal. Music and sound during video stutters too (so annoying). Windows now takes an age to boot up too. When going to defrag with O&O defrag, before the RAID drive would blast through an analysis, now both take nearly a minute.

I don't think it's my system; i opened my case up and completely cleaned everything out and re-applied the HSF, even underclocked the cpu. My temps are pretty cool, and i've tried Prime and got no errors. Ran adware checks etc, so I really do think it's the RAID setup that's causing this. I then reformatted and installed a SP3 slipstreamed version of XP, everything was fine again til about 2/3 weeks later. I ran chkdsk last night, apart from taking ages it's done nothing. Now i'm contemplating reverting to 2x500GB, but before I do I wanted to check here to see if anyone knows a solution to this?

Specs:

Samsung HD501LJ x 2 (RAID0)
Western Digital WD2500KS

GA965PDS3
C2D E6300 (oc'd to 3.11)
2GB Corsair DDR2
7950 GX2
Asus Xonar
520w Hiper PSU

help!

[ShenBlade]

could be a possible problem with the RAID controller, are you using an onboard RAID controller? have you tested with an external RAID controller?

[peterb]

Do you have a particular application (usually databases) that would benefit from RAID0? If not, there is (imho) little point in using it. Read speeds may theoretically be a little faster, writes can be slower.

While that doesn't answer your question, disabling RAID 0 would appear to provide a solution.

[NovaSphere]

Maybe this is a really dumb answer of me, since I don't know much about RAID controllers or anything.

But do you mean with "pause" that the computers shows like it's loading something? Like the little sand thingy (forgot hows it's called in English) that shows when you click an application and it's opening?
If so, I had that once before aswell, but I didn't do anything related to adding a new HD or setting up RAID. I ended up having some sort of virus on my computer which made my PC load every 50 seconds or so, sometimes even every 10 seconds, it "froze" my pc for like 1 second everytime, was pretty annoying and made it impossible to play any games or what so ever.
I ended up cleaning the entire drive and re-installing windows, which fixed my problem.

Might be this is really stupid and has nothing to do with your problem, but ah well, it's worth to mention ;P

[narz]

I think the pause refers to a momentery halt of doing anything at all...i.e not responding for those seconds.

[psd99]

when you play music or a film does it stop and start?

check your memory is properly inserted.

make sure nothing is loose on the inside such as graphics card not in properly
or sata cable not plugged in correctly.

[MarkyP]

this sounds more like a driver issue, with hardware it tends to work or not.

have you got the latest drivers for the raid setup?

have you tried connecting the drives as normal drives to see if it's that?

[magneticman]

thanks for all the replies guys, I think i might have been wrong in my theory though.

I had enough and decided to do a system restore to about 3/4 days earlier to that day and now the system is completely fine - the only difference between then and now was I installed drivers for my DSLR and installed photoshop lightroom.

So it could actually have been a virus like Novasphere says as his description matches to what seemed to be happening to me.

Thanks for the help guys.

[hibby]

Quick question, are you using the yellow or purple SATA ports on the motherboard? It's just that I've had stutters on my machine with drives connected up to the Gigabyte SATA ports (purple) which were eventually resolved by switching over to the Intel ports (yellow). Download the DPC Latency Checker and see if you're getting huge latency spikes. If you are, I'd suggest you switch the drives over.

I've got the GA-X48-DQ6, but it's using the same JMicron SATA controller for the 2 extra ports.