Is it normal for SATA HDD to cause lag in games?

So this has been happening to me recently: with a Western Digital Caviar Black 2 TB HDD installed as a secondary HDD on my desktop, with some games installed to it. Sometimes when a game is loading, the whole screen will pause about 3-4 seconds and then continue as usual. It also happens at times while in-game.

There aren't any other indications of abnormal behaviour: no skipping or fragmentation of pixels on the screen or anything unusual, just lag/delayed-response on the screen. I have not been super-concerned because the average frequency for it is maybe at most once every 1-2 hours.

When the pause happens, I can tell the HDD is whirring, and there aren't any sounds of note coming from it besides that. (I found a website online where they had sample HDD sounds from drives gone bad, nothing like that at all; also, I ran a full extended test of Western Digital's Data Lifeguard Diagnotic in addition to the regular SMART test: all reported normal/Pass).

So, my question becomes: anyone else have this experience? Is it normal for hard drives to do this? Are there any tune-up suggestions to remedy it?


Ty for input in advance :)

What kind of log would Windows need to write that often? Seems odd to me, but I'm still relatively new to Win7 (<10 months).

Establish a Clean Boot, check the logs for repeat errors to resolve, utilize the System Resources to solve Problems and Generate a System Health Report as shown in Troubleshooting Steps for Windows 7.

If these fail, complete all the steps given.