HDD "Stuttering" at random

[Vook]

So as of about a week ago, it seems my 4-year-old HDD has begun to randomly do what I call "stuttering". It'll just become completely unresponsive to any requests for about 30-45 seconds, before working perfectly fine again. And it seems to love doing this while I'm playing TF2, crashing the game after 5-10 minutes.

For example, I'll be playing TF2, when all of a sudden TF2 will just lock up and become unresponsive. When that happens, if I try to open any folder on the HDD, it won't load, and Explorer freezes, until the HDD responds again, about 30 seconds later. While playing TF2, this seems to happen every 1-2 minutes. While not playing TF2, I haven't noticed it at all.

So, I dunno, maybe it's something wrong with TF2 over-stressing my HDD or something, because it only seems to happen when I play TF2. Any other time when I go to the Videos folder on my HDD, it doesn't "stutter" or anything.

I tried defragging it (it was 16% fragmented!!) but that didn't appear to fix the problem. Is the HDD just dying or what? I mean, it IS roughly 4 years old, after all.

[vesseblah]

Is the HDD just dying or what? I mean, it IS roughly 4 years old, after all.

Probably. Would recommend taking backups of all important stuff as long as you're able.

Can you install the game into another drive for testing purposes? Or any other games into the old drive AFTER BACKUPS?

[chazus]

1) As Vess said.. Back up important stuff NOW. Assume the worst when it comes to this stuff.
2) Have you tried a HDD fitness test? CrystalDrive or Seatools or whatever is for that drive?
3) Any other drives you can test with?

[Vook]

Can you install the game into another drive for testing purposes? Or any other games into the old drive AFTER BACKUPS?

The only other HDD I have is a 1TB USB drive, but...I'm not entirely sure that running a big game off of a USB hard drive will yield good results. This specific external HDD is a Seagate one, and thus, I have the option of plugging it into the SCSI instead of USB, and even more conveniently, my desktop (Gateway LX6810-01) has two HDD cradles on the front that can allow me to do just that...however, making the thing fit in there and plug in is a bit of a hassle because the cradles are meant to fit full-size hard drives.

And like I said, it ONLY does this "stuttering" when I run TF2. At all other times, it has no problems. So I dunno, it's probably TF2 stressing the drive or maybe some file corruption in TF2's files?

I downloaded SeaTools, and "Short Generic" test passed, but "Long Generic" failed. Not sure what that means.

UPDATE:

Completely removed TF2 from my HDD and reinstalled it on the USB HDD...runs fine, from what I can tell. Doesn't seem to load slower or anything. A few little chops in the framerate after starting it up, but after playing for a while it was perfectly fine. Didn't notice a difference.

Oh well, I guess I'm just gonna back up everything on the old HDD, take it out and then plug the external HDD into the SCSI.