HDD Clicking & Microstuttering

[Dyscivist 5686]

So I just set up my new PC and everything seems to be working well, except my HDDs are doing weird things they never used to do on my old machine.

I took my hard drives out of my old machine and plopped them into my new one. The SMART data for them shows no signs of errors but while playing games on them I hear what sounds like a head parking noise from the drive and the game freezes for a half a second or sometimes longer. This seems to happen every couple of minutes. Of course, installing games on my SSD works perfectly and I never have any freezes, and this didn't ever happen on my old computer which leads me to believe it's either a software issue or possibly an issue with the PSU.

I've already disabled turning off the hard disk in the Windows Power Management settings and am at a loss for what to do now. Any suggestions?

Edit: Both of these drives are 5-year-old Spinpoints, by the way.

[Reaper0470 1123]

If you hear clicking from your HDD you should prepare to replace it like now. When you ran HDD tests did you run the short and long tests?

[Dyscivist 5686]

It's not clicking, it's a single click, like a head park. Yeah, I ran extended tests. The fact that I never had this issue with these exact HDDs on my other machine makes me think it's not an HDD issue.

[Ghost X 710]

Maybe something went wrong while moving them or static electricity?

[Siesan 1802]

you should be fine. Keep an ear out in case you hear any arabic. This would be a telltale sign that your hard disk has been rigged to explode.

[Ryziou 538]

Is your PSU plugged into a wall outlet or extension lead?

 

If it runs fine with your other machine then I'm gonna guess it's the PSU.

[Dyscivist 5686]

Is your PSU plugged into a wall outlet or extension lead?

 

If it runs fine with your other machine then I'm gonna guess it's the PSU.

 

Yeah it's plugged into a power bar, haha. Bad practice I know, but it's 650w and my other computer never had any issues at 750w.

 

Ran some tests with SeaTools and both drives passed every time.

Edit: Now thinking this might be an issue with the outdated HDD firmware. The WD drive I have in the machine seems to work fine.

Edit2: What a fucking gongshow.

Turns out the Intel drivers cause certain HDDs to constantly park and unpark literally every 5 seconds. This was causing my HDDs to click and freeze. The constant parking and unparking of the read heads has probably caused permanent damage to my drives and I wouldn't be surprised if they failed in the near future as a result of it. The only solution I found was a utility some random guy made that fixes it, whereas Intel are still sitting around sucking their own farts while their software destroys people's shit.