Could this be my HD?

[Seawolf]

I have spent the last month racking my head trying to figure out my performance problems in certain games. I have tried several vid cards,drivers,different Mobos,ram,etc and the stuttering just wont go away. I am running a Tbird 1300Mhz on a asus A7V w/ ata100. My HD is an IBM Dekstar 7200 ata100 30gb drive. Could it be my HD taking a dump? I dont notice hardly any disk activity during the games. i would normally start somewhere else like the Vid card (GF2GTS) but since that was my first try and every card i have tried did the same thing I'm down to my HD possibly being screwed. Im upset because its supposed to be one of, if not, the best Drives out there and its a little over a year old.
If someone could knock me silly before I go out and buy a new HD for nothing. The drive has been reformatted quite a bit over the past year or so, could that have screwed it up somehow?
BTW- the stuttering I see is not a rythmic stutter, its an annoying jerk once or twice a sec, but speratic and constant enough to make it look like cache or something (which has been played with and tweaked till Im blue in the face). anyway, the quest goes on to find the problem.
Not to be rude, but please try not to post stuff like "you need to tweak your cahe or ram or vid card, etc I have been through all that and this is my last hope with the HD thing. aaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrggggggggg! lol

[Scuba]

What exact sound ???
if your drive is "little" faulty you might get a big performances panelty (swap file).

[trinitro]

will those games happen to use a CD while running? That could cause the symptoms you're experiencing. Power setting can also do that.
hope that helps.

[Lycia]

You say it happens in certain games, which games? If it is certain games, I doubt it's hardware related.

[Budster64]

Originally posted by trinitro:
will those games happen to use a CD while running? That could cause the symptoms you're experiencing. Power setting can also do that.
hope that helps.

expanding on this a bit...if it is when the CDRom is running...is the CDROM on the same IDE cable as the HD?