Laptop hard drive freezes randomly

[jlyne1234]

Hello

I have been experiencing a rather annoying problem with my laptop. A random times, often not long after startup/wakeup my hard drive appears to freeze. The hard drive light lights up solid, any programs accessing the drive freeze and resource monitor says the disk is "100% active" yet also says "0kb disk I/O" is occuring. After a couple of minutes it fixes itself and anything ive attempted to do during the time it was frozen all happens really quickly.

The nature of the problem makes me believe its the hard drive at fault, but its smart readings are fine and ive ran the dell diagnostic tool that came with the laptop without finding any problems. Ive also done the ususal routine of updating drivers and the BIOS etc.

Also it has never happened while gaming, only ever while web browsing or other non-strenuous stuff, so it may be a problem with power management? Ive found several threads while googling that have the same problem but none seem to have a solution.

Any help would be appreciated.
Also ill try to screenshot the resource monitor when it happens again.

Thanks
Jim

Specs:
Dell XPS L502x
Intel core i7 2ghz (2630 i think)
8gb ram
Nvidia GT 540m
Toshiba MK6461GSGY 640gb HDD

 

[Petey7]

I'm gonna level with you. Dell's diagnostic software is not very good at all. It usually only detects a problem if the component is about to outright die. use Toshiba's HDD diagnostic tool to test your hDD. You should be able to download it from the link below.

Software Utilities

 

[mgp1964]

Do you have very many programs running when the system goes into sleep mode?
If so this could be the cause of your problem because all that info is saved to your HD in a swap file and then it is loaded back into memory from the HD, depending on the info this can cause a short delay when trying to resume.

 

[jlyne1234]

Hello again

Ran the test and it passed with no problems. Whats seems really wierd to me is that it freezes every boot up, yet i can run an entire surface scan (about 3 hours) and its fine
Also i usually have nothing open when i put it to sleep, at most firefox and media player are open.
This confuses and upsets me lol