Question HDD sometimes shortly freezing when accessing files

[SirTim]

My second drive, a Seagate Barracuda ST2000DM006 2 TB HDD is 2 years and 10 months old. Recently I started noticing that every now and then the HDD seems to freeze, or take a little while to access files. This happens when I am browsing file explorer, or when I want to scroll through a PDF after leaving it inert for a short while. These freezes take maybe 2-4 seconds.

The HDD gets optimised weekly by Windows, so there is no fragmentation.

Is this something I should be worrying about? Or perhaps, is there a solution to this minor issue?

 

[Zerk2012]

Go to seagate and download their program to check the health of the drive.

 

[SirTim]

Go to seagate and download their program to check the health of the drive.

Thanks for your reply. I did as told and performed all possible checks. The HDD passed all tests.

 

[Zerk2012]

Thanks for your reply. I did as told and performed all possible checks. The HDD passed all tests.

How much room is left on the drive when you get close to the 85 / 90 % full area that can cause problems.

 

[mdd1963]

Any audible sounds of the drive in question perhaps having to spin back up after 30 minutes of inactivity..?

Within Control Panel/Power Options/AdvancedSettings, you can manipulate time allotted before drive will spin down due to inactivity (I think default may be 20 minutes?)

Set yours for 2-4 hours to experiment just on ruling out undesired spin-downs for power saving...

 

[SirTim]

How much room is left on the drive when you get close to the 85 / 90 % full area that can cause problems.

Just over 920GB is still free, so I don't reckon that is a problem

 

[SirTim]

Within Control Panel/Power Options/AdvancedSettings, you can manipulate time allotted before drive will spin down due to inactivity (I think default may be 20 minutes?)

Set yours for 2-4 hours to experiment just on ruling out undesired spin-downs for power saving...

I did not know of these feature, thanks. I have it currently set to 1 minute, as an experiment. If this is what causes the issue, I should expect to see this happen very frequently now.

Any audible sounds of the drive in question perhaps having to spin back up after 30 minutes of inactivity..?

Is your drive making any weird noises as well??

As for these questions, I have not noticed any unfamiliar sounds. I must add, however, that my PC is placed under my desk which makes it hard to hear it at all.

 

[SirTim]

If it helps, I managed to capture one of these freeze in Task Manager. Seems like the disk activity maxes out, while the transfer rate stays almost completely at 0. Hope this helps.