Checking hard drive access around once per second for diagnostic

[darlingm]

A few times per day my system locks up for about 60 seconds, then "comes out of it".

My gut is saying my OCZ Vertex 3 SSD drive is the culprit.

Is there a program that I can have running that will see if it can read and write to the hard drive (even just a single byte) periodically? Like once per second? And log this? Windows 7 64-bit. If it were unix, I'd just write a shell script...

Like running a continuous ping on a network to check for packet loss...



During the lockups, the mouse can move but nothing is responsive. Strangely, it does appear SOME programs that were running continue to execute.

EDIT: No, it does not appear to be 100% cpu usage. Task manager continues to update. It's the ones that seem like they likely need the hard drive that stall... Web browsing (cache), etc.

 

[popatim]

It sounds like harddrive spinning back up to me. In power setting can you set the drive to never sleep/spindown? (a Green drive will typically ignore this setting and sleep anyways)

 

[darlingm]

It sounds like harddrive spinning back up to me. In power setting can you set the drive to never sleep/spindown? (a Green drive will typically ignore this setting and sleep anyways)

It's a SSD drive. But, yeah, it pretty much is acting like a non-SSD drive spinning up, just taking a lot longer than one of those should.