HDD Failing?

[MikGriff]

Over the past couple of days I've had pretty poor performance from my main HDD (Oldish Seagate 120Gb) my secondary HDD (250Gb WD I think) seems fine.

One example of the issue I'm having is when I was downloading something in uTorrent, I got the message "Hard Disk Overloaded 100%" and the PC was slow as hell, music slowed down, mouse speed, everything (CPU was also at 100%), until I quit uTorrent and closed the process in Task Manager, Loading windows has started taking an absolute age as well so this isn't restricted to uTorrent. (another example is when I apply a theme for windows it does the same for a few seconds- slow music etc.)

Now when I set the same torrent downloading onto my second HDD it worked perfectly fine.

Now before I go out today and buy a new HDD, does this ring any bells with anyone? is it the HDD failing or something else? (tried a new IDE cable)

TIA.

 

[rpstewart]

Have you benchmarked the 120Gb lately, it sounds like it may have dropped down to PIO mode which would explain the slowness and high CPU.

 

[TheDean]

I'm having a similar issue as the OP. Vista x64 will often slow and almost grind to a halt when I try to access my 400gb drive which as all my movies, music on etc etc. It has 115gb still left on it, but it's like it goes to sleep and then takes ages to wake up or something...