An interesting couple of things...
My niece got a USB wifi thingie from ebay. Turned up with a mini-cd with the drivers. Put it into the drive, it didn't show but wouldn't eject, even after (and during) a restart.
Finally got it out and put it into my computer's drive. Wouldn't read again but would eject. Only thing is, my dvd drive disappeared, even from device manager. Reboot brought it back.
I was playing around with page files, disabled all drives but some games (games!) wouldn't start if there was no virtual memory, so I set my backup drive (1TB) to use a system managed
pagefile. Noticed a few pauses at different times and tracked it down - the drive was powering down after 20 minutes, as per the power setting. So windows would go to write to the paging file
and have to wait for the drive to spin up. Now it's all automatic and windows has decided on C:, i guess because windows is on it there is no chance it will sleep.
Moral of the story: even with 8GB of RAM, leave it alone.