I'd really appreciate any help troubleshooting this issue.
I put together a computer with all new parts about a year ago. I have a SSD as an OS disk and 2x 2TB drives in RAID 1 as a data disk.
I never had any problems related to the drives at all, until I did an upgrade install from Windows 7 to Windows 8 recently. Now, whenever I try to listen to music or watch a movie stored on the data disks, the media constantly freezes, and then I can hear the drives "spool up", often several times in a row. Most times, it will get halfway through a song, or get to the next song, and then start doing this again. With Winamp, it seems to automatically buffer part of a song beforehand -- it'll play a few seconds and then freeze up before it can read the rest of the song.
I know coincidences do happen, but my intuition says this has something to do with my Windows 8 install, possibly because I upgraded instead of doing a clean install. I'm leaning toward reinstalling, but since that's something of a pain, I'd like to know if there's other steps I could take to troubleshoot. Maybe there's some new settings in Windows 8 related to this, that could affect it?
This is a desktop, with Power-Saving settings set to the default Balanced setting. It says to turn off the Hard Disk after 20 minutes, so I don't think that setting is coming into play.
edit: Forgot to mention I have Intel RST running, and it hasn't thrown any alerts or warnings.
edit:
Hardware:
OS - OCZ Vertex 3 120GB
Data - x2 Samsung Spinpoint F4 2TB
MOBO - ASUS P8P67 LE
RAID 1 is setup via the MOBO