Hard Drive Stutters - No SSD

[Major_A]

I have an issue and it's beginning to really annoy me. Every now and then (it's seems to be getting worse) I'll go to perform an operation and the machine will essentially lock up. Then after 5 seconds I can hear the drives click then spool a little bit and the operation completes. This was one of the reasons I went back to XP when I installed Vista back in January of 2007. At the time I figured it had something to do with the newfangled Superfetch and it was trashing my hard drive. Two years and a service pack later combined with several hardware updates and I am still experiencing the same thing. I have tried turning on/off Superfetch without a fix. I disabled Windows search feature but that wasn't the culprit. I have tried running minimal services without that doing the trick. I even gone as far as unchecking the "allow the indexing service to index this drive for faster searching" on both of my drives. I'm at the point where XP is no longer an option (I have too much RAM) so I can't just go running back to my safe place. If I can't figure out what the problem is by the end of the week I'm formatting the drive and putting the Business version of Vista on my machine. I know that Ultimate isn't the reason I'm having the problem but the bloat in it isn't doing me any good either. Bring on Windows 7 already!

With all the talk of SSD drives and stutters I thought I'd ask.

2X1TB Samsung Spinpoint F1's on Intel ICH10R controller
750GB Samsung Spinpoint F1 on Gibayte's JMicron controller

[Tech_Greek]

The head on your hard drive is killing out, you're lucky it lasted this long.

When the head completley fails you get a "click click click" noise, which is the head going to the end of the disk and back (magnetized action)...yours is half ass working!

[Major_A]

Thanks for the answer but I don't thinks that's the case. Like I said in the post this has happened with other installs of Vista in the past with different hard drives. My 2 drives are less than 3 months old. I have had several drives give me the click of death and this is not anything close to what those drives were doing. What is happening here is it's like Windows is momentarily freezing, almost like the drives are losing power.

Side note time on current RAID setup: I ran XP Pro x86 for ~ 2 months and no stuttering, no clicking, no nothing. I've run Vista x64 for ~ 1 month and for .5 of that I've experienced that stutter.

If I can find my mic I'll try to record the sound this thing is making. Right now I'm trying to find someone with a MSDN subscription to see what they can get XP Pro x64 for. I refuse to drop $140 (that's what the egg wants for it) on an OS that was never really supported, and with Windows 7 hopefully around the corner soon.