I just upgraded my motherboard to one with dual 3.2 GHz xeon cpus.
Both support hyperthreading, so I have 4 logical cpus. I'm running
WinXP and have 2GB of ram.

One of my old drives started clicking after the upgrade (only when it
is accessed, not all the time). So, I'm moving my files off of it to a
new drive. The old drive is a 40GB ata drive. The new drive is a 250GB
sata drive.

What I want to know is this: When the copying is occuring, the drive
will periodically click. When it does, my mouse stops moving for half
a second. Why is it that drive copying is causing my mouse to stutter?

There's no problems when it's copying normally. The stutter only
occurs when I hear a click. It clicks about once every 3 seconds.

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Clarification of Question by mxnmatch-ga on 20 Jan 2005 21:28 PST

The 40GB is fairly old, so I'm not particularly surprised that it's
failing. I know what a hard drive is supposed to sound like and it's
not supposed to click like this. The timing (right after upgrading the
motherboard and installing winxp) means that I have no idea what is
causing the potential failure. I changed numerous things during this
upgrade.

There's also the fact that it only clicks in between files. Copying
large files isn't a problem, so I'm a bit suspicious that winxp is
doing something strange.

However, what I really want to know is why my mouse gets hung up on
the clicks. I ran the Performance utility (the one under and
Administrative Tools in the control panel) and although the processor
line never goes very high, there are huge spikes in the Pages/sec and
Avg Disk Queue length. Both of those values drops to zero every time I
hear a click.

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Clarification of Question by mxnmatch-ga on 23 Jan 2005 17:07 PST

I was able to copy all the data off of the drive. It took a really
long time since it had to click after most files. But, I got it all
off and removed the drive.

After going to all the trouble and expense of upgrading to this very
powerful machine, I'm still rather disappointed that unrelated disk
access can stop everything. I wonder if it's just the architecture
that's the problem or if it's windows that is the problem.

The system feels much faster in many ways, but it doesn't feel blindingly fast.

Your hdd is bad for whatever reason. Is it failry new, maybe you could
send it in and get it fixed?

This is more than the normal clicking of a drive? Seems to be
searching for the MBR and fortunately finding it. But mouse hiccup is
weird. Standard mouse? If you run an animation at the same time does
it pause? If you put up the ticking clock, does it miss a beat too?

Best

That HDD sounds sick to me

I would replace it pronto. And then bin it.

The mouse stutter does not surprize me much, as within a PC,
regardless of the number of CPUs - it is just one 'thing'.

When a program goes to the disk the current task's 'stream of
execution' goes down into the operating system - like a rabbit down a
hole.

When it is writing to disk it is performing a very high priority task,
which is going to eat CPU usage. Lower priority tasks will suffer.
Responding to the mouse is a relatively low priority task.

Given that it is obviously having serious problems while writing to
disk, the 'rabbit' is running around inside the warren like a March
hare.

Put more technically the copying routine is relying on a single thread
(sensible) and while writing to disk that thread is not servicing its
Windows message queue. In effect it is in a 'tight loop'.

I am also not that surprized that the disk is playing up after you
upgraded the motherboard. These things tend to happen when one
disturbs an established setup.
It could be just S*d's law, and it might be that the HDD objects to
being driven harder - and has thrown a tantrum.