I have a workstation that has been acting up for the last few weeks. It currently has Windows Server 2008 R2 installed on it, and 2 HDD mirrored.
A few times per hour the screen will freeze up, applications will say "not responding", sometimes the screen will turn a lighter shaded color--at the same time the HDD light is on solid. This lasts anywhere from 10 to about 50 seconds.
Could this be something with one of the drives or the mechanism keeping the mirror in place? Any other ideas?
I'd be inclined to believe this is one of the drives being read holding the IO channel open while it repeatedly rereads or rewrites a bad block. Check your smartd statistics or error logs for indications of a problem, but, I'd say one of the two drives is about to fail.
You really should run some drive diagnostics on this. Ideally you should run diagnostics on the whole machine, because what you describe can be caused by a number of things. e.g. Defective power supply periodically losing voltage regulation.
