Mark Twain wrote:
Here's the HDTune scan of the 780,
I'm running a Kapersky scan on the
8500.

http://i65.tinypic.com/28wfdso.jpg

Robert

That's not looking very good.

Check the Health tab, the Reallocated or
Current Pending "Data" column. A value of 0
in the Data column is good. A value of 5500
would be bad. The value is thresholded, and
isn't an absolute measure of affected sectors.
There could have been 100,000 bad sectors, before
the counter comes off the 0 value and increases.

That graph suggests you should be able to "feel"
an effect when it's like that. If you have your
spare handy (the spare you were threatening to buy),
you could clone over and replace it.

It's really up to you, when to replace it. You have
good backup practices, so I'm sure you have an image
you can use if the drive stops working completely.

When I had a drive here, that "felt" slow, I replaced it.
The health indicator (Reallocated) data column was
still 0 (says drive is good), but the drive was
obviously in bad shape, because you could feel
the slowness in everyday use. I wouldn't even have
run HDTune, except it felt bad, and then I could
see in HDTune, the benchmark told the tale.

The drive varies between 80MB/sec on one end and
40MB/sec on the other end. From a generational
perspective, the drive could be ten years old.
I still have drives in the pool like that (a
couple 250GB ones) with that level of performance.

I would do something about that, if it's at the
"annoying level" now.

Paul