Hard Drive causing Internet related Lag Spikes

[Infired]

Hi,

Recently a problem has started happening where I would get "Spikes" in my internet, making me unable to play or use any application that uses the Internet (e.g. League of Legends, where every 10 or so seconds, I would get a small pause and everything will stop making me unable to move but if I click to try and make my character move, I will hear the sounds or sayings they say when they move, but on my screen nothing happens, then after a while, everything goes back to normal as if no spike happened. Same goes for when I'm on Skype talking with my friends, I will get a pause and be unable to hear anything then after a while I can hear my friends again.)

My current specs are:

i7 2600K
Gigabyte GA-Z68XP-UD3
16GB Kingston RAM
Radeon HD6950 2GB
60GB OCZ Vertex Plus SSD
1TB Seagate Barracuda HDD
OCZ ZX850W PSU
Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo
Cooler Master HAF X
Windows 7 Home Premium

Now, the spikes generally occur randomly during the day. Sometimes they happen at night at around 8 and never go away sometimes they even happen during the day (around 4 or so) Then there are times when they don't happen at all.

I'm pretty sure that the problem lies within my PC (most likely my HDD) since when both me and my brother play League of Legends at the same time (He plays on my old Laptop) he can play perfectly fine (smooth as butter).

I saw an old post explaining a similar problem and found two "Solutions" where 1. You turn off IPv6 and 2. You disable caching on your HDD. I've done both but the problem persists.

Here's a picture of me pinging Google (my way of checking if the spikes are occurring) http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/33/lagspikes.png/ As you can see, I get "Request Time Out" which is basically when it spikes or whatever (Can't really think of a word to describe it)

Any help to resolving this problem is much appreciated

 

[leeghanger]

We had a similar problem with a computer from one of our clients.
It turned out to be an ATI service running in the background which caused the system to hang for e few millisecs at random intervals.
I have nog explanation to why this occurred but disabling all the ATI services did the trick.
Maybe try to disable all ATI services/programs or update video drivers.
maybe a good idea to also check your hard drives for bad sectors ( a good tool is hdtune free).

 

[zootnerper]

My 2 pence worth.

Why do you think it's the hard drive? Does the HDD light come on every time when a spike occurs?

Might be drivers for the SSD? (Do they have drivers? (I don't use Windows)). I believe you can update the firmware on them too. Might be worth looking into both if you think it's the hard drive.

Does your system get (too) hot? CPU or GPU?

How old is the PSU? Do you have access to another you could plug in and see if the problem persists?

You could re-seat the HDD cables and if that does nothing all cables and components (Like graphics card)(I wouldn't do the CPU unless you really think it necessary)

Not much help, sorry. Just some ideas for your puzzling problem.

-- Zoot

 

[zootnerper]

Another thought: Virus checker being over zealous?

 

[Infired]

We had a similar problem with a computer from one of our clients.
It turned out to be an ATI service running in the background which caused the system to hang for e few millisecs at random intervals.
I have nog explanation to why this occurred but disabling all the ATI services did the trick.
Maybe try to disable all ATI services/programs or update video drivers.
maybe a good idea to also check your hard drives for bad sectors ( a good tool is hdtune free).

I updated my video drivers to the latest version and ran a SMART test with both HDTunePro( Trial Edition ) and Seatools for Windows. HDTunePro said the health of it was OK and Seatools said it passed. I ran a quick error test with HDTune and there wasn't anything bad.

Now, the only thing left is to disable all ATI Services/Programs in the backround but I have no idea how to do that.

 

[fiber00]

I hope this thread is not dead because i have the same exact problem i checked everything. The only thing i can think of is that in HDtune my hard drives has UltraDMA CRC error count 200/200 but still the lag is happening only playing internet games, skype and while i get connection time out pinging.