Stuttering on secondary HD

[switch_foot4]

I have an ASUS ROG G750JH (http://www.asus.com/Notebooks_Ultrabooks/ASUS_ROG_G750JH/overview/)

Any games that I install on the SSD have zero problems, but any games that are installed on the secondary HD stutter all the time when loading in new audio samples. Also if I play music off of the secondary HD, the song will stutter for the first second or two. I've updated my sound driver.

EDIT: After playing around with a few games, its not just on new sound samples. Sound - Anytime a sound is first loaded there is about a 1-2 second stutter in which any audio currently playing is looped and the game hitches.
On certain games switching inventory pages or loading up a shop will cause the game to hitch for about a second, but the sound won't loop.

Does anyone know how to fix this?

 

[Phillip Corcoran]

First, defrag the HDD if it hasn't been done for a while.

If that makes no difference, test the drive to see if it's faulty, using the drive maker's diagnostic software. Links here:
http://www.tacktech.com/display.cfm?ttid=287

 

[switch_foot4]

Thanks for the reply. Windows 8 "optimizes" and defrags all of my hard-drives on a weekly basis. I just ran a 3rd party defragmenter on it and it showed no significant difference in fragmentation.

The HD in question is an HGST HTS541010A9E680, so I got "DFT For Windows" from the HGST website. The extended tests showed that it passed with no errors.

I've updated all the drivers on my system including my BiOS. I'm kind of out of ideas as to what the deal is. I would think if a 5400 RPM drive couldn't load things into RAM fast enough to prevent stuttering then a lot more people would have this problem. Is there some difference in the setup of my drives that causes this to happen?

 

[switch_foot4]

So the problem turned out to be an APM problem with the harddrive. Installing QuietHDD (https://sites.google.com/site/quiethdd/) which is a free program that alters this value on the fly completely fixed my issue.