Occasionally, like several times an hour, my hard drive will appear to lock up: Task Manager will show 100% active time with read and write speeds of 0.

I can still switch between open windows, but anything that requires a disk access will stall for around a minute until the hard disk starts working properly again.

It happens at apparently random intervals, and only happens in Windows 8. Not 7, nor Linux.

It is probably not a problem with the disk itself:

1. This is a relatively new hard drive, and S.M.A.R.T. is showing no errors.
2. Only happens in Windows 8: not any other OS that has used the same partition, or different partitions.

So, what is going on? How can I fix this?

Note: this is a different problem then this one: Extremely high disk activity without any real usage

My task manager would look similar, but Average Response Time, Read Speed, and Write Speed would all be 0.