I have been having freezing issues in Firefox for sometime now after I upgraded my hard drive in my laptop. My main issue is I will be using Firefox and then everything freezes for 5 to 30 seconds. I have a Dell 6400 running Vista Ultimate 32bit (Yeah getting old now). The original hard drive was a 160GB with 512KB sector sizes. The new hard drive is a Western Digital 750GB with the new advanced format 4K Sector size. Most new hard drives use the 4K sector sizes. Only windows 8 supports 4K sector sizes natively. XP, Vista and Win7 have to use virtual 512e sector sizes and use read modify write to write to the hard drive. This means it is a bottleneck when software writes to the hard drive. If you want to see the issue in action open up the resource monitor and watch the disk activity (you have to open before you have a freeze). If you get the freeze then look at the disk activity and you will see it has to empty the list before the freeze stops. This is obviously the computer waiting for the disk queue to empty before asking the drive to read or write again. I've read that other people have this disk issue, but for me it always seems to be Firefox that causes it. So I think that for some reason Firefox has issues writing data to the 4K hard drive or Firefox writing to the pagefile which then has issues with the harddrive. My Work PC (Dell Latitude with Win7 64bit 750Ghard drive) also gets little freezes, but not as bad as my own laptop. Again this has a 4K sector sized hard drive. Again if you watch the disk activity it was writing to the hard drive when the freeze occured.

Do other users who get freezes have Advanced Format 4K sector size hard drives? Do other users with Windows8 (native support for 4K sectors) get the freezing?