Most information is loaded into RAM because the HDD isn't fast enough to pull the information at the speeds that the processor needs. Your problem most likely lies somewhere else.

Up to date on gfx card drivers and/or did you recently update them and then have the problem?

Had a similar problem, re installing steam seems to have fixed it for me.

If your HDD is failing, you'd probably notice performance issues outside of TF2.

Make sure you don't have excess/unnecessary background processes running, check for viruses, and do routine maintenance (defrag, disk cleanup, maybe run something like CCleaner). And of course, take into consideration the above comments as well. :)

Haven't updated recently, I'll check for new ones.

I try to make sure I don't have unneeded programs running.
I'll check out CCleaner, thanks.

I'll give it a go.

Run Disk Checkup, use the 'disk self check', report results. 40mb/s write is rather low, 70-120 is what regular HDDs should be getting(even 10 year old ones). What you should be more concerned about is read speed. Anything under 80 MBs sustained read should be concerning. Crystal Disk Mark will tell you your actual read/write speeds.

Actually, the easiest way to tell would be to copy the entire steam folder(from program files) from your main hard drive to your usb3.0 terabyte drive, then run steam from there. If your issues disappear, you've found your problem.

Do you have anything overclocked?

If it's a HDD issue it would most probably lock up, not really jitter per se. I used to have my TF2 + steam on an old ass WD Green HDD, which have slow as hell read speeds. I would often lock up when an uber was popped being a pain in the ass. I put it on my WD Black (faster read speeds) and was fine; put it now on SSD's in RAID 0 and no issues at all still.

Funny enough, I'm having the same issues...but it started when I upgraded to SSDs. Brand new solid state drives and suddenly Windows does these little "freezes", I thought it was only in TF2 at first but I'm seeing it microfreeze for about a second every once in awhile in all my games, flash video, and even when doing a lot of scrolling on webpages. My Linux SSD does the same, but that seems limited to TF2. Still have no idea whats causing it but its making playing TF2 a lot less enjoyable.

If I understand correctly, you have the same issues on both OSs on the same machine? That sounds like a chipset/ssd incompatibility. What chipset are you running? Is the ssd set to AHCI mode in the BIOS?

I had the same problem and it was the hard drive. I saw there was an issue when watching the Disk Performance in Tack manager. I uninstalled Steam and reloaded it on a solid state drive and reloaded TF2 and it works great now. Everything else worked good on the hard drive, but will back up pictures just in case.

How did you even find this thread?

great i'll let him know if he ever visits this site again

I'M HERE TO NECRO A THREAD HELLO LADIES