very excessive disk I/O activity

Okay, this is my final resort before going completely insane as this issue has been incredibly frustrating, and Microsoft and Realtek seriously needs to fix this problem.
Issue: With anything that loads sound (confirmed it's a sound driver to Microsoft Windows Vista/7 issue) the whole system freezes for a few seconds and then tries to catch up. (THANKFULLY MY DESIGN HAD IT) My Acer Aspire 7552G's hard disk activity is going off the roof. Process Hacker indicates that explorer.exe is having absolutely insanely high I/O reads when (most of the time) the system loads a sound byte depending on the program/game. Games/applications involved are:
-Winamp
-StarCraft: Brood War
-IRIS Online
-Ragnarok Online
-Global Agenda
-Mozilla Firefox

Note, most of these have very low hardware requirements. Specs are:
-AMD Phenom II X4 N920 Quad-Core 2.1Ghz Mobile Processor
-12GB of DDR3 1333 RAM
-Realtek High Definition Audio 24-bit (this is probably the cause of the issue)
-Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit (also had issue when using Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit) Operating System; Linux Ubuntu 10.10 x86-64 Maverick Meerkat
-Seagate Momentus XT 500GB Primary Hard Disk Drive/Solid State Disk hybrid; Western Digital 500GB WD5000BEVT 5400RPM Secondary Hard Disk Drive
-Controller types are set to AHCI
-ATi Radeon HD 5650 1GB Dedicated Graphical Processing Unit
-Windows Classic Theme for Windows OS

Linux runs this fine. Windows is having this issue.
Services I've disabled that impact disk thrashing:
-SuperFetch
-Windows Sharing Services
-Windows Indexing/Search

If I can't fix this, I'm going to cry because this was one of those systems that they stopped selling because the specs were REALLY good for its price.

 

OK, let's try to do some troubleshooting here.
Have you tried other versions of the Realtek audio driver? For that matter, what version are you using now?
Have you tried setting the sound card at a different frequency and bit depth (i.e. 16-bit, or 44100 Hz)?
Does a completely clean install of Windows 7 exhibit this problem?
Have you seen if this problem persists on 32-bit Windows 7?
Have you tried installing Windows 7 on the secondary hard drive (dumb, I know, but we can't rule out the Seagate Momentus XT causing problems)?

 

Because of the fact I use VMs with large amounts of RAM and various other applications (I have a 12GB capacity), 32-bit isn't really an option. Constantly reinstalling Windows is a bit of an irritance because I have a dual-boot with Linux. I've tested all frequencies, I've tried the OEM driver from Acer website itself. Whenever the system freezes up, disk activity indicator goes nuts. Current version is R2.57.
I've tried Vista and 7, and they both have the same problem.
I've tried 24-bit and 16-bit audio, each individual frequency. I turned off enhanced effects.

I concluded that the hard disk is going bad, and will be installing an SSD in the future.

I'm continuing to search for possibilities, and just installed the RTM of Win7 Service Pack 1 to test to see how well it runs. However, when I use my brother's external sound card I gave him, the freezing up dies down a lot, but still happens from time to time.

 

Well, how can you conclude the hard drive is going back without running tests on said hard drive?
(just playing devil's advocate here)

 

Ran several SMART tests on the Hard Disk. Linux reported bad airflow and a bad sector.

Looked more into the issue. It tends to not cache the sound objects, so the whole system pauses for 5-15 seconds until it loads that sound into active memory. And it stays until the application is closed or until the system is shut down. I managed to work around the issue with the hard disk, but will still be sending it in for replacement once I get an SSD.

So now it's been eliminated to the point where it runs very smoothly after it freezes up to load that sound byte that wasn't loaded before in the same session.

 

Another good tool for troubleshooting hard drives in linux is iostat part of the sysstat package. Running this:

iostat -xd 10

and watching it will show you what your drives are doing. Look at the three columns labelled avgqu-sz, await and %util. That's the queue size, average wait in milliseconds and how much of the capability you're using.

If under normal usage, like web browsing etc, you've got 100s of things queued up, and an average wait into the thousands of milliseconds and the %util is maxed out near 100%, you've likely got a drive going bad. On a healthy machine you'll see numbers like: 1.31 41.79ms and 4.40%. On a drive going bad it'll be more like 96.45 1500ms and 85% or something like that.

 

Hi, long shot, but have you tried turning off AHCI, I had freezing issues with certain laptops and the only way to stop them was to switch over.
Chris

 

I'll need to do that.

I also installed a (leaked) final release of Windows 7 Service Pack 1, and it also helped a lot. While I prefer AHCI, if IDE fixes it, then I suppose I'll need to stick with it...

 

Don't mean to double post, but this is to bump it as well.

Ran disk utility under Linux. Ran an Extended test, but failed to properly read the disk. It's definitely failing, and performance under the Windows OS is getting worse and worse. It's never happened before until about a month ago. Seems I better begin backing up my stuff before the drive dies completely...

Airflow, sector count and sector health results came up with red flags.

 

Constant hdd activity like that may indeed be your hdd failing, mine did that too (5553g). if you can, try booting windows in safe mode and get hd tune to scan the entire hdd. make a screenshot which you save (externally (usb?), try to limit the remaining number of writes to that hdd as much as possible). Then bring the laptop back to the shop and show them the screen and demand a replacement (if in warranty, probably), it should say them enough.

 

It will not be covered under manufacturer OEM warranty. When I bought this machine, I separately purchased most of the hardware I use now. Pretty much the only thing OEM now is the CPU, GPU, and motherboard. And the optical drive, but that's getting upgraded soon.

I've already contacted Seagate, and my drive is supposed to come in today. I'm using Linux (installed on my secondary internal drive) to backup all of my data to an external drive, replace drive, reinstall Windows, and just go on from there.

Damage has spread to the point where Windows cannot properly read data without excessive stress. Thankfully my drive's coming in, and I'm in the process of backing everything up

Thanks for your help, all! I'll keep you posted on how it goes!

EDIT: The Seagate Momentus XT 500GB hybrid drive includes a 5 yr warranty, so it's all good