System Freezes when HDD Accessed

arthurpan12

Distinguished
Sep 22, 2009
3
0
18,510
I built a computer some time ago:

CPU: AMD Phenom II X4 970 Black Edition Deneb 3.5GHz
MoBo: ASRock 970 EXTREME3 AM3+
Vid: SAPPHIRE 100315L Radeon HD 6850 1GB 256-bit
System Drive: OCZ Solid 3 120GB SATA III
Memory: G.SKILL R 4 x 4GB 240-Pin DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800)
OS: Windows 7 Pro

Everything runs great. BUT, I bought a 1.5TB HDD from a friend (this was last year when HDD-land flooded) that he'd archived some stuff too, and then stored in an anti-static bag, in a case. He got the stuff off it, and then gave it to me. I'm at work and don't have the model details, but can update later with those. I plugged it in to use as a non-system drive, and I started copying files to it and using it like normal. For awhile, it was great, then after some time (around 60 gb or so) I started getting system freezes when I attempted to access [the most recent batch of transferred] files. Just freeze, nothing else, no read errors, no warnings, just a straight freeze. Defragging caused it after about 1-2% of progress. Even spin-rite 6 seems to be crashing when it gets "there". It takes a few hours for spinrite to make it to the bad area, so I'm never there when it crashes, and it doesn't actually tell you where it was scanning when it crashed. If I didn't access it, the system would eventually freeze, presumably when some process scanned or accessed that area, whether the computer was awake and in use, or after my monitors had been automatically turned off...
Unplugging the drive makes my computer run, and sleep, and wake perfectly normal, and I even have an older HDD plugged in that causes an error message to pop up saying there's a disk error (on that particular drive, and plugged into a different sata port), and that I should back it up. But I can still use most of it.

So...why isn't the drive isolating the bad sectors and avoiding them, and why can't I attempt to repair them with spinrite? Do I have to suck it up and get a different drive? Do I have to do something special in my BIOS?