windows 7 - Very Slow Hard-Drive until reboot

I am having a weird problem lately and I am pretty sure that my hard drive is failing and would like your input.

I am on Windows 7 32bit, Core i7 970, GTS 450 Video Card and 4GB Ram (3.5 usable).

I have 2 hard-drive, my main one is 750GB WD Green drive, my other drive for data is a 1500 GB WD Caviar Black (Both ATA).

It's been 2 days straight where I was playing Guild Wars 2 without any problem when after a couple of hours when I had some very important lag, some missing audio or very late. At first I tough it was just a internet problem. But exiting the game the problems continued. Everything was so slow. I still had some audio missing and very very slow everything.

For example I had a couple of Windows Update to do, so if I was to restart I would as well do them right now. But the downloading and Installing bar seemed stucked at 0%, but when I rebooted, it did install some updates. So the computer was so slow it couldn't even update the Progress Bar.

I used HDTune to check out the SMART status of the drive, where everything checks out for both. I did a quick bad sector scan and found none. But for performance for my 750 GB had a min value of 0.8 MB/s and 5.6 max, while my second drive was 150MB/s. This very poor performance (even for a green drive) is telling me my drive is failing. But just rebooting the computer would fix the performance problem (going up to 80MB/s from 0.8). Then again the problem returned while playing only to be fixed by a reboot.

I have checked with Autoruns and disabled unnecessary program loading, and I don't see anything that doesn't belong there.

My CPU temp was at 45C, my HD temp at 36C and my Video Card was up to 70C, while playing.

One thing to note, is that I am having a lot of Out of Memory crash with GW2 so I did enable the "3GB" switch the other day (using this command :"bcdedit /set IncreaseUserVa 3072").

So my Questions are :

• Would the 3GB switch affect performance of only 1 drive?


• If the drive is failing why is it fixed with a reboot?


• Maybe the motherboard?