hard drive problem

[behemoth27]

i bought a ibm 40gb 7200 rpm deskstar 120gxp harddrive about 3 months ago. it worked fine all through then and performed well but one day my system freezes and when i reboot, it has trouble loading the os, taking way longer than it usually does... seemed about like a 5 minute boot up time. i didn't know what happened but it would eventually boot but everything seemed slower. loading programs and opening windows took extremely long. i defragged and rebooted many times and it has slower gotten a little better but not as good as it was before. the main thing i notice now is a short little pause every 3-4 seconds. while moving my mouse i can tell it pauses every few seconds and while watching video or playing games. i think it is a problem with the harddrive. can anyone help me with my problem to fix it or do i just need to buy a new harddrive. i've been looking at the western digital 80 gb with 8 mb cache. please help.

thanks

 

[Boonesmi]

head to ibm.com and download "drive fitness test" it will let you know if the harddrive is working properly

 

[NateSLC]

I had a 60 GXP that served only as a data drive. My OS was on another drive. The data drive died and I exerienced the exact same problems. My OS booted slowly and everything was slower with pauses. What was happening was the OS was attempting to access the other drive and couldn't. I downloaded IBM's Drive Fitness Test and it turned out that the drive was not salvageable. This happened on the 9th and IBM just barely shipped me my new drive today.

Good luck.