Dying harddrive or just driver issues?

[darael]

I have a machine that has been rebooting a lot. I've never been able to drill right down to the root cause of why, but I've assumed it to be either malware, virus or drivers.

Done full and thorough scans with SUPER Antispyware, Spybot, Malwarebytes and ESET v5 - nothing turns up. Combofix brings nothing up. So I'm reasonably satisfied it's either hardware or driver issues.

I ran HD Tune benchmark, and drive didn't go above 3.5MB/s, and read at about 3MB/s from start to finish. Suspicious of cabling, I lookeed in the info tab - it says the drive is capable of UDMA 6, but running at UDMA 5 speeds - but even so, it should be hitting something around 60MB/s at the start of the drive.

So this leads me to think the harddrive is failing. But nothing overly abnormal is showing in the SMART data. This is a link from Speedfan, showing the online analysis: http://www.hddstatus.com/hdrepshowreport.php?ReportCode=5514140&ReportVerification=AAD8B43E

So should I be looking at swapping the SATA cable? Or is it safe to assume the harddrive is goosed?

I've installed the latest chipset drivers, with no increase in speed. But could there be something I am missing?

 

[Wucked]

Random reboots can be caused by allot of things. You need to give more info on the symptoms. What kind of reboots, BSOD's? Hardware resets? Are there any error messages, either during or after the events? Is there anything showing up in the event log? Is there any pattern to the reboots, i.e. when gaming, or under heavy load?