Y50 Hard Drive Freezing

Hey all, I've got a Y50 (i5 version with the 1TB SSHD) and have had a number of annoying issues with this computer that I've been able to mostly resolve. However, there's one issue that I haven't been able to solve and it's driving me nuts!

The hard drive will periodically cause the computer to freeze for 2-3 seconds, after which it will resume functioning normally. I notice this most in World of Warcraft, however it doesn't happen only in games. It also happens when watching movies on an external hard drive, for example. I'm sure it's the hard drive and not any kind of CPU throttling (I ran ThrottleStop and at least my i5 version doesn't seem to have any throttling at all, also FPS doesn't drop the screen completely freezes), and also the hard drive lights up fully whenever the freezes happen.

What I'm guessing is happening is that the hard drive is spinning down, and then when a program requests data from it it has to spin back up. It seems like the spin up takes a very long time, and is what's causing the freezing. I've tried turning off all of the power management features of the drive through the Intel RST program, but that hasn't fixed anything.

Does anyone have suggestions here? I know many on here bought this computer with an SSD or upgraded it after purchasing, but I'm stuck with this hard drive for the foreseeable future and these intermittent freezes are super frustrating. :cry:

 

I think it's a problem caused by windows 8.1. Go to google and search "100% disk usage" and there are some fixed. I stopped the restore funciton and it works for me. hope this help.

 

Looks like you may be right! I've been doing some searching and the problem does seem like it's with Windows 8.1 and not the drive. Well, at least this is one thing that's on Microsoft and not Lenovo Actually a couple other issues I've had (getting out of memory errors while playing games, and problems with an external display) were with 8.1 as well...gotta say, this operating system so far hasn't impressed me much at all. I thought the problems with it were mainly on the interface side and that under the hood it's supposed to be so much better than 7, but in my experience that hasn't been the case.

Anyway, thanks! I'll be trying out some of the solutions when I get home from work, fingers crossed

 

Further, I have bought a SSD yesterday. My disk usage never goes above 30%. There must be some problems with the latest Windows 8.1 when running on a 5200rpm hard disk. Don't know if it will be getting better if running on a 7200rpm hard disk. Anyways, hope Microsoft will fix this soon.

 

I have refused to update my Win 8 to Win 8.1. I am happy to keep on being stubborn.