Possible dying hard drive?

I'ved owned a WD800JB for a couple months now. Has been working great, but lately it seems to be having problems.

Seems whenever I write to the disk, as in installing programs, or modifiying files, the whole computer slows to a crawl. Even the mouse movement becomes jerky, almost to the point that I have to restart the computer. When the writing is finished, the computer runs just fine.

If I reformat the drive, it'll work fine again until I fill it up to a certain point (i.e ~8gb used). Then the problem starts....

I've run WinXP's chkdsk a couple times to scan for bad sectors, but it can't seem to find any. I need a reason to RMA this peice of junk, so does this problem sound like a hard drive malfunction? How can I be sure?

It does not occur whatsoever when I write to my other two drives (in raid0).

I formatted my Lifeguard disk shortly after buying the drive, is there anyplace to download this software? (never needed "lifeguard" software when I owned IBM drives


TIA for the help.

Sounds like your are running out of memory but you have 512 so that shouldn't be a problem. What is your disk transfer speed?

Disk transfer speed up until lately has been normal (comparable to 120gb 8mb) in Sandra.

Now I can't get Sandra to finish the benchmark. If I did, I'd be waiting all day for it. I just left it on for a good half hour, and had to shut the application down because it still wasn't done.

It seems the drive only has problems writing to it... Does this sound feasible?

Check your drive in another machine. I had the same exact problem on an old motherboard, but it turned out the IDE controllers were screwed.

http://support.wdc.com/download

for Data Lifeguard

The controller is not bad, as other drives work off the primary controller, even the master. I ran the extended data test in Windows (lifeguard), and it passed successfully... Any suggestions?